Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
But those aesthetics matter to a great many people. I have dozens of second-hand books for sale on Amazon, and they sometimes take months to sell, despite being much cheaper than the new book. I conclude from this that the majority of the book-buying (or the Amazon book-buying, at least) customers prefer to spend the extra for the new book. That effect would not exist for ebooks; there would be no reason to prefer a new book to a second-hand one, because the two would be indistinguishable from one another.
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The majority of the Amazon-book-buyers, like any other book-buyers, would prefer not to pay $4/book for shipping, and give a hefty slice of that to a third party, regardless of the price of the book. If used books from the same vendor combined shipping, or had a process like "first book $4, next book $2, $1 per book after that" or "$4 hardcover, $2 paperback" for shipping, the sales would increase dramatically.
The real difference between used pbooks and (hypothetically legal) used ebooks isn't "the used one is the same quality level as new." It's that the ebook can be transferred instantly--if used ebooks were totally legal but you could only exchange them at the county courthouse, they'd provide no notable competition for new ebooks--and that you can have an effectively infinite number of them without affecting your living arrangements. The convenience of ebooks doesn't change between used and new, and that's their #1 desirable feature.
I've skipped buying excellent pbooks that I wanted because I knew I had no place to put them; they'd just be clutter. I might want to read them, but I had no interest in owning them. With ebooks, there's no reason to not-own; they don't take up wall space, and they're not hard to find when you remember one and want to re-read part of it later.