Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
Buying a second hand pbook also circumvents paying for a new pbook. That is the point.
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But there's a difference between a new and used pbook. The used one is a little scuffed up, might be marked up and might have coffee spills on a few pages. Few people would give a used pbook as a gift. You can sell it because you're not selling quite the same thing that was originally sold, and after each sale its quality decreases until after a while it "
gets used up" naturally by wearing out.
But ebooks are totally immune to coffee spills. If there were no limitations on reselling, the same copy could be sold and sold and sold. Artificially limiting resales to a certain number could be done, but to what end? It would be an attempt to make an ebook behave like a pbook.
Reselling ebooks bears some similarity to recording a movie you received over cable (you paid for it, after all) and reselling it.
If the free market is allowed free reign, ebook prices will drop and there will be little incentive to resell them. Already,
Smashwords authors sell books at a fraction of what bigger name authors sell them for. And that site seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. I see promise in that.