Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Publishers who want to protect their profits should be taking a hard look at the secondary markets, not ebooks, as competition.
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I agree. Besides flea markets, eBay, used book stores, and thrift stores, there's several on-line book trade sites where you can trade your used books for the cost of media mail or less.
The site I use has over 5 million used books on offer. (Don't know how much of that number are duplicates) but say that since they've been open have helped members trade over 11 million books, over 50,000 mailed in the last seven days, and over 2,000 dropped in the mail today.
Plus, with Wishlists, a lot of people are content to get their books used, for (many times) cheaper than a used book store, and bypass buying anything new and just getting in line for it.
That's a huge number of books being passed around.
In fact, many members won't go to eBooks because they'd have to be the 'first purchase' on the books they want to read, and then can't trade them back out for a new book afterwards. Although many have gotten eReaders just to be able to take advantage of the free eBooks and Kindle trades and never buy books. But I think those numbers are few in compared to the membership as a whole.
I think publishers suffer more impact by the secondary market than the eBook market. It's just that they can't do anything about it, so it's easier to just ignore it and blame something they think they can control.