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Old 12-27-2011, 05:02 PM   #17
taustin
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rogue_librarian View Post
They call it Amazon, you know? Or the Book Depository, which ships from the UK (I'm on the continent). Or dozens of other stores.
Mail order is a different animal entirely, and far more complicated. Publishers, for instance, would actually be prohibited from selling you a book directly outside the area they have distribution rights to. But you don't buy from the publisher directly.

Same is true of buying an ebook from Amazon, but in the case of a paper book, you're talking about a physical product, for which there is a couple of centuries of case law regarding the first sale doctrine. Once the wholesaler owns a copy of a physical object, the publisher has very little control over what they can do with it by law, and contracts can't modify that. Extensive case law.

The same principle really can't be applied to ebooks (or any other digital media) because of the trivial nature of making infinite perfect copies. Hence, the current trent towards thinking of ebook purchases is licenses rather than purchases (while maintaining the financial advantages to the publisher of treating it as a purchase - that's where greed and stupidity come in).

Publishers are trying to preserve the best of the old business model, while screwing everybody out of everything from the new technology. And authors often (I suspect) have a very unrealistic expectation of what those magical world-wide rights are really worth, and their agents don't have much of a vested interest in teaching them better.
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