Quote:
Originally Posted by wawasteele
I've sold books at yards sales. I've given away books. I've purchased a lot of used books.
I think we should be able to do the same with ebooks. The problem as I see it, is the ability to sell an ebook and still keep a copy of it. That would be so very wrong. I wish there was a solution for that problem.
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I didn't mean to suggest that I thought the used-book scene wasn't
valid. I was only trying to get a feel for how big of a scene it really is. It feels pretty niche-ish to me (based on more than just the responses in this thread, of course).
I would love to see a legal mechanism to allow the transfer of these licenses to a new "owner" under special circumstances, but I don't really see the point of a full-blown, used ebook market; unless you're one of the middlemen who will make a killing re-licensing these "used,"--and most likely re-DRMed--bytes (which is the only type of used ebook market I can ever picture being legally sanctioned).
Plus ...
reading an ebook has no physical ramifications. The used ones would be utterly indistinguishable from the new ones. What would be the point of a new/used distinction? And why would people ever buy new ebooks when the market would be flooded with identical--but cheaper--versions the very next day?
At best, I see the development of a
delayed (pre-approved) secondary ebook market. Meaning ebook retailers will "buy back" (and revoke) the license to the "new" content and then re-license them to buyers who were willing to wait a pre-determined amount of time for new ebooks to become "used" (said period of time to be determined in conjunction with the original publisher).
I don't see a will-nilly, end-user to end-user used ebook market ever happening (legally).