Amazon investigating used e-book sales

Yes, in the sense that an enormous meteorite the size of Texas screaming towards the Earth would be 'interesting'.

How do I hate this? Let me count the ways:

1) Lots more money for Amazon, no extra money for authors or publishers
2) Hideous legal/contractual entanglements to sort out
3) Implies the need for horribly persistent DRM, but also feels like it might make DRM impossible, so we'll end up with some kind of hot mess
4) People setting up their own fraudtastic ebook stores because we can't reliably trace the provenance of every ebook. Is it something that was legally purchased or just copied? No idea. So we get ACTUAL for-profit piracy on a massive scale instead of ebook filesharing.
5) Ugh

I just automatically hate any ideas Amazon comes up with.

I am more bothered by the insanely general patent. Like no-one else could think if a place to buy and sell digital files.

I don't know if this Idea can be made to work ? But I can't see the difference between reselling a paper book and a digital one .

stephenf said:

I don't know if this Idea can be made to work ? But I can't see the difference between reselling a paper book and a digital one .

Click to expand...

A paper book is one book. You could copy it or scan it but it would take ages. An ebook can be copied without limit and within minutes. I could give you a file without loosing that file myself.


But how the hell can an ebook be 'used'? It's not like the quality would be less. Colour me confused.

CQuinlan said:

A paper book is one book. You could copy it or scan it but it would take ages. An ebook can be copied without limit and within minutes. I could give you a file without loosing that file myself.

Click to expand...

Another implication is that the person who does the file copying -- making 10,000 copies, say -- gets all the revenue and none goes to the author. Effectively, it turns the middle-man into the person who profits from the book. With physical books, you'd have to buy 10,000 copies to sell them, but with ebooks, you just need to buy one, and you're making all the money that would go to the author. The copier could price their book at .99 or even freaking give it away. It takes the power of material distribution completely away from the author. My suggestion is borrow an ebook from your library because many of them are lending ebooks now.

It could leave them saying what file-sharing sites do. That their members may break the law every second, but they are an innocent bystander. But with the extra legitimacy of the Amazon brand.

The proposed used digital marketplace would take that one step further. Instead of loaning the access rights of an e-book, music file, video or application, in exchange for some cash, the original owner of the digital file would transfer the rights to use that file to another party permanently.

If the file were downloaded to a device, after the sale, the original owner would be unable to access the file. the data would still be on the device until deleted by the original owner, but access to the contents of that file would be turned off.

Click to expand...

This inherently implies DRM, and furthermore, DRM that's exclusively under Amazon's control.

Publishers could rewrite their contracts with Amazon to specifically refuse to give a license for such a "resellabe" ebook, but I wonder if that will happen. It wouldn't be the first time Amazon has pissed off publishers.

benbradley said:

This inherently implies DRM, and furthermore, DRM that's exclusively under Amazon's control.

Publishers could rewrite their contracts with Amazon to specifically refuse to give a license for such as "resellabe" ebook, but I wonder if that will happen. It wouldn't be the first time Amazon has pissed off publishers.

Click to expand...

Current ebook contracts don't contain any provision for resale and in fact it is expressly prohibited by our copyright page boilerplate (though that could be superseded by the terms of sale I guess.) The situation is much like that of Kindle lending: though Amazon are set up to handle it, most publishers don't tick the 'enable lending' box, for a variety of good and bad reasons.

The DRM would have to be under Amazon's control to some extent - Kindle DRM already is, of course, so I think this would just be an extension of that, with Marketplace ebook sales being brought into the fold. But I don't know whether the law would force publishers to allow resale via other DRM systems - so that if I bought a .mobi copy from Amazon, would I then have to be allowed to sell it as an epub with Adobe DRM? That in turn implies some kind of legal tool to strip the Kindle DRM and replace it, while preserving the license history.

You can specify a number of 'lends' allowed on Kindle. So presumably 'paid lends' would not be an impossible leap.

veinglory said:

You can specify a number of 'lends' allowed on Kindle. So presumably 'paid lends' would not be an impossible leap.

Click to expand...

Technically, yeah. Contractually...?

It seems to me that a less messy choice would be to offer rental periods on some ebooks like they do with movies. That's something the publisher can have more control over, I believe, and it gives people the opportunity to pay less for a book without removing the incentive to pay full-price for an owned copy.

veinglory said:

It could leave them saying what file-sharing sites do. That their members may break the law every second, but they are an innocent bystander. But with the extra legitimacy of the Amazon brand.

Click to expand...

This is what I was getting at. People that are pirating books already are going to sell those pirated copies. You're going to have a glut of ebooks in the used column that cost pennies. Who'd buy the regularly prices ebook when you can get a 'legal' used book for practically free?

I don't believe Amazon would allow the sale of DRM-free or copied or otherwise "unregistered" ebooks. I don't get that from reading the article.

benbradley said:

I don't believe Amazon would allow the sale of DRM-free or copied or otherwise "unregistered" ebooks. I don't get that from reading the article.

Click to expand...

Right, but the question is who has control of the resale mechanism. If it's all done under Amazon's auspices, of course they won't allow for any of that stuff. But some of the pressure for this is coming from things like the recent Oracle decision in Germany. If it turns out that secondary markets in digital content are sanctioned, then the DRM underpinning them would have to allow licenses to pass out of the control of Amazon at some point, or you've got yet another monopoly.

PEBKAC said:

That's somewhat addressed by information in the article and the patent.

DRM is used to manage how many times content may be transferred/sold/downloaded/moved between devices/etc. Imagine this situation: I buy an e-book for $10. The rights/DRM are such that it can only ever be accessed from 5 individual devices ever. I download it to my Nook and a copy to my computer. I get a new e-reader for Christmas and download a copy. I buy a new computer and download it there. Now I decide to sell it. It can only ever be copied to one other device ever. When I go to sell it as used, I only get 1$ for it because the buyer can only put it on one device ever, and can't resell or ever because all of the licenses are used up. After the sale goes through, it is removed (or rendered inaccessible by DRM) from all of my devices.

That's just one example of how it could work.

Click to expand...

That sounds horrible.

article said:

“There are no dog-eared pages or scratches or nicks or cuts or highlighter marks or whatever,” says Bill Rosenblatt, a consultant and expert witness in digital content patent cases. “It’s the same exact product.”

In other words, a customer given the choice between a “new” e-book and a less expensive “used” e-book will buy the used copy every time. The extra expense of “new” won’t get you anything better. So why would Amazon want to get into a business that would seem to undercut the business they’re already in?

Click to expand...

Therein lies my big issue. But I don't agree with the bold. I can think of many reasons Zon would want to get in this bed--it's going to turn a lot of heat up on publishers to lower their "new" prices, which is the same drum they've been beating for ages.

But what about the publishers and authors? Sure, I buy used and remainders. But I also buy new--for that new book smell, or to have that perfect dust jacket of a pretty new copy of my favorite author's book. But the used ebook is going to be the exact same--no remainder mark, no highlights, no bent edge, etc. So why would I buy a new copy (aside from timing) if I can get a used copy for even a dollar less?

It really puts the screws to the publishers and authors.

JSSchley said:

It really puts the screws to the publishers and authors.

Click to expand...

It's Amazon trying to burn down publishing so that they can rule the ashes.

Say goodbye to the profession of "author."

And good luck finding well-written, enjoyable books in the endless mudflats.

JSSchley said:

Therein lies my big issue. But I don't agree with the bold. I can think of many reasons Zon would want to get in this bed--it's going to turn a lot of heat up on publishers to lower their "new" prices, which is the same drum they've been beating for ages.

But what about the publishers and authors? Sure, I buy used and remainders. But I also buy new--for that new book smell, or to have that perfect dust jacket of a pretty new copy of my favorite author's book. But the used ebook is going to be the exact same--no remainder mark, no highlights, no bent edge, etc. So why would I buy a new copy (aside from timing) if I can get a used copy for even a dollar less?

It really puts the screws to the publishers and authors.

Click to expand...

Amazon doesn't care - they sell k-cups, snowshovels, tires and toys.

That's why I don't support them - they sell EVERYTHING and thus can take a loss in one area so they can profit in the other.

They are no friend to the publisher OR author, imo.

The topic hit Nathan Bransford's blog today.

I made a tl;dr comment, but I am really intrigued by the commenter who suggests that in the face of DRM, etc., ebooks need to go the way of Netflix. I find myself agreeing that such a model is a superior way to handle a lot of the problems with ebook pricing (though I think the monthly subscription would have to be figured out--$15 seems too low for me.)

By an large, if Amazon is for it, I'm against it. Amazon is bad for writers, and worse for readers.