Secondhand ebooks?

[Kumabjorn]

What kind of copyright can you have to a web page?
What about a site like MR where content is added daily?

[latepaul]

Copyright can consist in aggregations of publically available data - the usual example is a telephone directory. You're not breaking copyright to copy a single number but to copy the book as is you are.

I know of forums where there's a copyright notice at the bottom of the page. When queried on one of these the site owners stated that whilst an individual has copyright over their own contributions the site has copyright over the page as a page - so you couldn't just copy a thread for example. Also licensing the site to use your individual posts in this way was part of the TOS you agreed to when signing up.

There was some sort of controversy over this at Slashdot a few years ago and I forget the details. Anyway now there's a notice saying you own your own comments.

[gweeks]

Originally Posted by latepaul

Copyright can consist in aggregations of publically available data - the usual example is a telephone directory. You're not breaking copyright to copy a single number but to copy the book as is you are.

Not in the U.S. The telephone directory is the explicit case given where there is no copyright. See Feist vs. Rural

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

Greg Weeks

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Somebody has to make a copy or how could they read them on their reader or computer. If you open a web page you have a copy of that web page on your device.

Are you imagining that the book would be automatically be deleted from your cloud server when someone accessed it? Perhaps never to be seen again? Would that even be acceptable to you?

Why would anyone pay for a pirated book anyway, although I know some do. More importantly, why would you be selling access to books you do not own, when you have always contended they should be free.

Get a grip on your integrity man!

Helen

Well the server would be set up to only allow one person to access the book at a time, unless I/You had bought two "copies", then I suppose we could allow two people to access the single "copy" on our server. There would never be a reason to delete anything, as it should be.

I can't recall ever saying that books should be free, but I do believe we should be able to access any book that we want. But the central point is that if this ebook server is set up, no ebook will ever be sold again.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

That's about what I was going to say. When you resell a paper book, you are selling the only copy (unless you spent time making a photocopy which would likely cost more than the original). When you resell an e-book, you are making copies of it. Even if you are going to erase the original (or just say that), you still have made a copy of it. So you are not selling your one and only copy and you still have access to it for as long as you like.

You can scan a paper book and if you move an ebook from one folder to another you are making a copy and erasing the original.

Originally Posted by DuskyRose

But ebooks don't suffer age like physical books do. I feel like they'll always be new, whether someone else owned the file or not.

Don't they? There are copying errors, you know. Ebooks require maintenance. The format needs to be changed. They need to be stored somewhere.
'Oldest printed book' on display - book that was printed in 868 AD. You think that a digital file can last that long?

[Elfwreck]

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.

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.