Quote:
Originally Posted by mdmorrissey
The revolution will begin when individuals can sell or lend their ebooks the way they can their paper books.
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I guess the difficulty here is that, unlike a second hand paper book, an e-book is not really second hand - unless the file is corrupt for some reason, if I were to give you a copy of my ebook, it would be as "pristine" as when I first read it - or as I read it for the umpteenth time.
So the only discount you would get on it is if you have some doubt that the seller is selling you a genuine ebook and not some empty file, but this is a problem of confidence not unlike buying stuff on ebay, it could be easily got around with some kind of reputation system. So if individuals could sell or lend their own books, they could in principle sell millions of them, drive the price down to zero, and publishers would go bust. And perhaps this is the way it will end up eventually...