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Originally Posted by NatCh
If folks want to do so voluntarily, that's excellent, but trying to build it into the marketplace is reinforcing the content rental concept, except expanding it to cover the physical as well as the digital.
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I just want to find a way to make it easier to pay the author (or their designated charity or whatever) if I like their book. Amazon Honor System would work for me, or PayPal donations, or whatever. Actually, I wouldn't mind doing this sometimes for books I buy new. I don't think of it as rent -- more like tipping.
Anyway, the idea I think I was trying to get at with that little side trip is this: just as Apple said they were in competition with pirates when they started iTunes, publishers interested in selling eBooks should probably consider themselves in competition with the
used book market. Take a look at the prices on
http://abebooks.com (or used books on Amazon). Pick pretty much any book. The used paperback price is probably about what most people would be willing to pay for an electronic copy. I have no research to back this up, it's just a "gut feel" -- I think the used book market is closest to what filesharing/pirates were for digital music, not in ethical terms, but in terms of what people will pay. People who buy used books do so for a number of reasons, of course, and some will pay quite a lot for something rare and in excellent condition -- those aren't (for the most part) the books I'm talking about. But for your typical novel or even non-fiction book, I think this is pretty close to accurate.