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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Correct. But in the case of a pbook, it already sold once, and the publisher collected the revenue.
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In the case of a bootleg ebook, it already sold once, at some level or another. The publisher got the revenue for one sale--the issue that needs to be decided is "how many readings are reasonable for a single sale?"
I've heard estimates ranging from 6-10 on average; I haven't seen anything substantiated.
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Nope. By the time a pbook hits the used bookstore market, the likelihood is that it is off the shelves in retailers. It is not competing against new copies currently on sale.
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Have you looked at Amazon's used book listings? Yes, reliable used book selection at physical stores is generally after the hardcover has dropped out of print, or at least out of its initial marketing push, but online sales have changed that.
The Great House, published earlier this month--officially $24.95, Amazon price $13.99, used hardcovers from $11.95.
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Do you know a way to do it? It requires that if I sell you a pre-owned ebook, I no longer have it. The value is in scarcity. If I still have it and can simply give you a copy, what incentive is there for you to pay me? It's hard for me to successfully charge you in those circumstances.
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B&N came up with a way to share/exchange DRM'd ebooks, but they limited its use far below what the law allows for purchases.
For incentive: people buy WATER. In bottles. They don't just buy one bottle & refill it from the tap; they buy more bottles. The incentive to pay is immediacy & convenience; value-of-contents becomes secondary.
If authors/publishers had a way to allow "you can resell this as long as the copyright owner gets 25% of the sale," and (this is important) the process for handing over that 25% were simple and efficient, they'd *rake* those royalties. People would sell used ebooks to friends for a dollar, keep $.75, and hand a quarter to the publisher. Instead, right now they have (1) friends who don't read ebooks at all, because nobody's offering them cheap copies of the titles they're interested enough in to get used to new technology, or (2) friends who get free, cracked versions of popular titles.
Neither of these makes the publisher any money.
I don't know how to make the technology simple-and-efficient. But ten years ago the web was convinced that $1 sales would never be efficient; you just couldn't manage that many micro-transactions and make it worth the effort. PayPal changed their minds. We need an ebook equivalent. (We need it to work for music, too; plenty of people feel vaguely guilty about handing their whole collections to their friends, but not guilty enough to tell their friends to spend hundreds of dollars for an evening's worth of party music.)