Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
I am pretty sure they would be at the most mildly displeased if you share your ebook with one person at a time, and that person returned it to you and deleted all copies without sharing it with anyone else. Or shared it with someone else with equal integrity, so that only one copy was at all possible to be read at a time. Not saying that any number of people cannot read that one copy as long as their is only one copy, just like in paper books.
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One of the issues with selling "secondhand" eBooks or MP3 files is that digital data doesn't degrade with time, as a physical product does.
If you go to Amazon (which I choose as an example simply because they sell both new and 2nd-hand books) and you see a new book for £5, and half a dozen 2nd-hand copies of the same book for prices ranging from perhaps £1 to £4, you're still quite likely to buy the new copy at £5 because there's a significant physical difference between a new book and a 2nd-hand one, and perhaps because you think Amazon are a more reliable seller than an unknown 3rd party.
That's not the case with an eBook. You'd probably always buy the 2nd-hand eBook for £1 rather than the new one for £5, because they are exactly the same, and you get an instant download in both cases. Offering 2nd-hand eBooks would completely destroy the market for new books, in a way that selling 2nd-hand paper books does not. A publisher could NEVER sell a new eBook if 2nd-hand copies of that same book were available, because there would be absolutely no reason to buy the new copy. Allowing the resale of eBooks could very well result in the destruction of the eBook industry.