Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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?
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Yes, ebooks and pbooks are different, so the model must change. The question is how. I've been wrestling back and forth with that.
Here's
one possible model. There are no
used book sales since used books are indistinguishable from new books and the supply of new books is limited only by website bandwidth. Therefore ebooks end up with a lower price, almost an average of new and old.
Of course sellers won't do this out of the kindness of their hearts, but if they have wiped out an entire market, they have to do something to recapture those sales. Lowering the price would be a logical way to do that. As with all sales in a free market, the price will gravitate to the prices that generates maximum profit, which will probably be below current prices.
Another model would be that after a few months or years of sales at a high price with DRM, the books are sold with no DRM at a greatly reduced price. The lack of DRM opens up the market to people that passionately hate it or have technical problems, and the lower price reduces the incentive to steal.