Amazon wants to sell your used ebooks.
Yep, it’s true. Amazon wants to sell your used e-books, and a lot of people are really, really upset by it. “It’ll ruin author’s livelihoods,” some say, and “It’ll destroy the publishing industry” say others.
BTFU.
Before we all go running through the streets with our hair on fire, let’s think about it for a second.
Amazon wants to sell you an e-book for your Kindle and then, once you’ve read it (or not), give you the option to sell it back to them so they can re-sell it to someone else. This allows them to sell it without paying anything to the publisher (and thus, the author), just as if it was a physical book…
Hey…wait a minute…
Yes, that’s right. It is just like a physical book. Right now, today, you can buy a brand new book from Amazon and it will come to you in a happy, smile-swooshed box. You can read that book (or not) and then you can sell that book back to Amazon. Or to Half-Price Books. Or Powell’s. Or…or… These doomsday prognosticators seem to have missed the salient point that there already is a whole secondary industry for physical books and that it hasn’t “ruined author’s livelihoods” or “destroyed the publishing industry.”
You can sell Amazon your used books, your used Xbox games, your used DVDs. How is this different?
It’s different solely in the fact that there isn’t a physical item to transport from one place to another. That’s it. But for some reason this one lonely fact is making people go all Chicken Little.
Get over it. It’s a book. Physical or virtual, it’s a book. You buy it from Amazon…they didn’t have a problem with that. They read it on an e-reader. No problem there. They may even have lent it to a friend to read on their e-reader, and didn’t bat an eye. But now, the idea that they can sell it back to the store to re-sell as used to someone else, somehow that is making them froth at the mouth?
Granted, there are problems with digital publishing. People have had their libraries wiped, had all their George Orwell suddenly go missing (how ironic is that?), and can find that the version they bought has mysteriously been updated (like a “director’s cut” of your favorite book). These are serious problems that are part and parcel of the rapidly changing landscape.
But re-selling a copy you’ve purchased is not one of these problems. Let’s concentrate on the real issues.
k
Unraveling Time
Desert Wind
Ploughman's Son
Ploughman King
The Year the Cloud Fell
The Spirit of Thunder
Shadow of the Storm
The Cry of the Wind
Beneath a Wounded Sky
Cryptogenesis: A Memoir
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 
While I kind if agree with you, I think that there is a difference. A physical book has a finite lifespan. Eventually, it will wear out. In theory an e-book will last forever.
I don’t think that used e-books are going to destroy the publishing industry, but I do think that it’s something to think about.
LikeLike
Um…I’ll disagree with you on that. How many times have I bought The White Album? LP, cassette, CD, MP3…
I have a book on my shelf printed in 1704. Yet, I’ve already “lost” several books when the company maintaining the e-reader I had (a Rocket 1100) closed shop and took all my titles with it.
Formats change. Companies die. Books last a hell of a long time.
LikeLike
I was going to start this reply by saying that the difference here is akin to re-selling music…but Amazon aren’t doing that and I don’t think that they would dare. Can you imagine the artist’s fury if, once a song has been downloaded, the buyer can re-sell what isn’t theirs to sell; ie their intellectual property?
Now, with a ‘real’ book, once it’s sold back to the shop, the buyer no longer holds it and has no further access to it. However, with an eBook, the buyer not only sells on something that isn’t theirs to sell (and neither is it Amazon’s) but that buyer can still retain a copy of that eBook on their PC, Laptop or whatever, which is akin to their having copied (illegally) that work – which is copyrighted.
A serious can of worms, this one.
LikeLike
Amazon _is_ working to resell MP3s, as well as ebooks. And I can re-sell my CDs, can’t I? Just like a book. As long as I lose the rights to use a virtual item once I sell it, it’s just like a physical item, and any workaround is piracy.
There are all sorts of workarounds that would allow me to buy-burn-sellback a CD or MP3 and those problems would need to be addressed before they can move in that direction. But e-books via Amazon’s Kindle Store are more strictly controlled (to many people’s unease, in fact) so Amazon can wipe it from your Kindle more easily.
LikeLike
Amazon may be able to wipe an eBook from a Kindle (or even my Kindle-for-PC) but they cannot track my purchased eBooks once they have been moved onto another PC via memory key or stored on a remote drive. Not that I engage in such activities – but I have the hardware to do so.
In such cases, I would be able to falsely sell back a book that I could also retain – as you pointed out, the equivalent of burning a CD and reselling it…an act which remains illegal.
LikeLike
Agreed. And yes, it’s piracy. I suspect that the new generation of Kindles will require an online check-in to ensure your content isn’t…shall we say…”out of synch” with your purchased rights. And I assume Amazon will only be re-selling items you’ve purchased through them, as well as putting in some sort of data check for patterns of abuse (perhaps not a safe assumption).
I don’t think this is without issues. I just don’t see it being the industry-killer some people do.
Thanks for the comments, Andrew! I really do appreciate the feedback.
LikeLike