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Perhaps someone would care to pop into a used book store and ask a friendly bookseller if they think some of the books they sell come back into the store more than a few times? I'd do it myself, but nobody speaks English around here(!)
Or perhaps there's some friendly booksellers who could provide some info on this basis? I ask mainly because rather than going back and forth whether it's true or not, let's find out if it is, based on at least some direct experience. I can imagine that in a 'small mud puddle of a town', some second-hand books might indeed be sold several times to different people for lack of a well-stocked library or a box-store bookseller within easy reach.
In my home town of Glasgow (no, not the place where nobody speaks English, though it could be argued), there are a *lot* of charity shops selling 2nd-hand books, and indeed these have cards mounted on their shelves encouraging you to return the book once it's been read so they can resell it yet again and generate more income for the charities they represent.
May I take this opportunity to posit another reason why ebook prices so often still remain high? It occurs to me that by selling an ebook, a publisher loses the opportunity to sell you that book again - in twenty years time, when they reprint it, and your original copy is starting to fall apart. Digital copies don't crumble, and can be copied onto different backup mediums indefinitely; therefore once that book is sold to you, it is likely sold only that once.
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