Quote:
Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
Buying used books for half list price (or less) and then selling them when you're done reading them doesn't take any space either, and it's much cheaper than ebooks. It is my hope that the publishers will eventually decide that there should be a ebook price-point that corresponds to the used paper book market, but I don't expect that to happen until most of the likely buyers of eReaders have done so and are done buying their "must-haves".
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This is because a secondary market in ebooks cannot be created without the goverment agreeing to create a mechanism, using something like overdrive and some kind of license transfer (fee)? There is no incentive for publishers and authors to do this, unless they benefit, and given the small margainal costs on ebooks sales long term, once original publishing costs are recouped, each additional sale approaches pure profit. This is why publishers focus on costs for newly published books when discussing their costs. Since there is no reason to let books go out of print there is an opprotunity for pubishers to benefit for a much longer time frame. Big busines will continue to use the piracy bogeyman and the outrageously long copyright periods to print money.