[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

The reseller, just like with pbooks. Or any other intermediary.

Sure. How?

It doesn't matter how complex the legal/contract issues are. Digital texts are marketed as "books," not "licensed software plugins" that you "access" with a program. That means people think of them like books... and when done with a book, a lot of us hand it to someone else to read, or resell it.

Publishers aren't all that upset about used book stores. If the book shows up in the UBS, it already sold once, and generated revenue for the merchant who sold it and the publisher who published it. It's not stealing sales of new books. It's a fair bet that in most cases, buy the time it shows up in the UBS, it's already off sale most other places. People who wanted it that badly bought it new. People who were willing to wait for it to hit the UBS wouldn't have bought it new.

There are nascent lending programs for ebooks, such as the one implemented by Barnes and Noble on the nook - you can lend a purchased ebook to another nook owner for two weeks. The significant part is that while it's on loan, you don't have it.

This is one major stumbling block to used ebooks. If I sell you, or give you, a printed book I own, I no longer have it. How do you enforce that with ebooks?

They can remove the "resell" option from the legal realm; they can't remove the ability to hand it off. (They're trying really hard with DRM.) What they're managing is to keep word-of-mouth promotions of ebooks down to furtive, backroom conversations while killing real publicity, because "I love this author--you should fork over $10 and find out if you like him too" has never been how books got a foothold into a new audience.

Speak for yourself. Getting a copy passed along by a satisfied reader is only one way books find an audience. Word of mouth is critical, but it depends upon whose word. I may very well buy a book without sampling it first depending upon just who recommended it.

For ebook publications to thrive in the future, instead of remaining a weird crossover of "geek hobby" and "luxury entertainment," they need a parallel to the used pbook market.

That's questionable. I'd make a fair bet that ebooks will take over the mass market PB segment, and they won't need an equivalent of a used book market to do it.

I don't know how it can work; I just know it needs to show up, or ebooks will remain as they are now--great for people who can afford to pay full price for every book they read, great for people able to scrounge the internet for rec lists of obscure titles or links to unauthorized copies, but useless for students, the poor, people in hospitals, and other large categories of people who support the joy of books without buying new copies.

How large a segment of the market do you assume that is? I knew very few people who read at all that don't buy some new books, even if the majority of their purchases are used.
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Dennis