According to Passive Guy's site, they are coming:

 

"At a time when many independent booksellers both here and abroad are beginning to gain traction selling Kobo e-books, other retailers are eyeing the secondary market for e-books and other digital content. Boston-based ReDigi, which opened a used digital music storefront in late 2011, may have gotten there first, but megaretailer Amazon isn’t far behind"

 

How do you feel about this?  My reaction is that it will kill off all but bestselling authors again.

The revolution of self-publishing will be over.

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It will become the same as libraries - they buy e-book licenses and only loan out as many books as they have licenses. So a used ebook license can resell, but only one at a time. It does mean that many people will be able to read your book with only one person paying for it, but it isn't infinite.

We always fall back on the idea that the people who take books out of libraries may become future customers, or may not buy books anyway, so it isn't really a lost sale. It's the same thing here. Some of the people who buy your book will resell it back to Amazon but many won't. And the people who buy the used book likely wouldn't have bought your book at full price anyway.

I thought that low cost of ebooks would have eliminated most of these issues, but it seems with books there's real penny-pinching (and here we are in Canada getting rid of the penny).

But Amazon is like every other company, when revenues slip they'll look at ways to cut costs. Ways we probably can't even imagine, but ways that may affect the authors... ;) 

 

You guys in Canada get a little something for the library borrows.

I don't think most library patrons become future customers.  Maybe a few will, but the majority will prefer to get a book for nothing. Why should they pay?  Paying for something you can get free is stupid.  This affects genre books far more than literary novels. Those people like to have on their book shelves, Genre novels are read quickly and tossed ( or returned to the library).

Sorry. I have very little appreciation for the American attitude towards books. I own tons of books and would cringe at reselling them.  On the other hand, I do use the library heavily.

I think John McFetridge is right. It'll be interesting, though, to see how Amazon the used e-book store balances this with Amazon the new e-book publisher.

I'm wondering if this is even about sales. 

It's hardly enough money to worry about, especially since any used sale would definitely be a sales loss for the new ebooks.

Amazon is sneaky and arcane.  It's possible this is just some way of legally establishing "ownability" of ebooks, so they can enforce some other evil.

Well, considering the number of sales Amazon manages, both new and used, I expect they would in fact open a new lucrative market.

 

Hmm, I wonder if one can pay formatters to build in something that makes a used e-book useless, or at least less desirable than new.

"t's hardly enough money to worry about, especially since any used sale would definitely be a sales loss for the new ebooks."

That doesn't matter if all they're more concerned about dollars then volume of units. Let's say Amazon pays a publisher 5.00 and sells the book for 10; they make five dollars. The reader sells it back to Amazon for a buck; Amazon's net is down to four. But when they re-sell it for $3.00, their net goes up to $6.00. They made an extra buck on the deal. 

They also never have to worry about the condition of the used book. It's always pristine.

Wait a minute! Separate the deals. They made 5 dollars on the first one.

On the second, they spent 1 dollar but made 2 dollars. Altogether that's 7 dollars.

But this game goes on, because presumably they can buy a book back forever. And we are talking millions of sales.

Oops. you're right. I counted that dollar twice.

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