Eric Rhoades: ?A printed book is just as ephemeral as a a data file. ? ? I didn?t say that it wasn?t, (although there?s an argument to be made for how easy it is to wipe out data files.) But I was talking about not my argument but the argument that had been made to me repeatedly by others that data files are much more temporary and ephemeral than printed books in terms of their ownership of them and storage, really more of a loan than a purchase, and therefore, e-books should be much, much cheaper since they didn?t get to keep e-books for long (and since there was the firm, incorrect belief that e-books cost practically nothing to make and establish in a large scale retail market.) But the concept of reselling e-books clearly shows why that argument was bogus to begin with.
?People are not policed either when it comes to duplicating physical books.? ? Again, I didn?t say that they were. I said that the retail e-book market had been established as a good faith market. The print one already was one.
?Would your opinion change if ebooks were distributed on physical media such as an SD card or a CD?? ? You mean like they were in the 1980?s? I?m not sure which opinion you think I have here.
?Also, data is an object. It has mass. It is -real- in every sense that a printed copy is real.? ? If you want to get down to the electron level, yes, but that?s not really what we are dealing with. Data is electronic transmission and code. When I come here and read the comments, I?m downloading a transmission of data to which I have access granted to me by Scalzi, WordPress and my Internet server. I don?t have to pay an access fee for that data, (though I do have to pay a monthly access fee to my server,) though I may for the New York Times. If I buy an e-book from Kindle, they grant me access to download the file. They can then simply erase the file from my Kindle at any time, removing my access. Of course, if I?ve copied the file and downloaded it into storage elsewhere, then I still have the data and access to it (the good faith issues again.) But the reality is that my buying an e-book from Amazon and my buying a print book from Amazon are therefore two different things. For e-books, it?s the access for the compiled and coded data that I am buying. I am not buying software directly when I purchase an e-book ? I already bought software that is installed on a Kindle or other device which then allows me to store and read the data file. (The formatting of the e-book is a type of software, and I have to have software and hardware that can read that formatting, but I?m not really buying the formatting.) So what I pay for with an e-book is for Amazon to transmit a file to me and let me read it on my device which is an actual physical object that I have likely bought.
And the good faith part of the market is that while I?ve got access to the file, I don?t do certain things with it, such as sell that access to another person. With Amazon?s plan, then I would be able to sell that access legally through a broker who sells access to e-book files. What we?re really talking about is changes to how access to book data is sold, with ways that data is already being sold elsewhere for other things coming to the book market. And the issue is that when you sell a used book, you are selling an object that has lost some types of value, that is not the same as the new book. That slight difference is not enough to deter used book sales, but it is enough to make new books valuable over used ones, even though the text is the same, allowing used books to support new book sales.
Because a printed book is not just the printed text, but is also an object that can be displayed as a possession of the person in the home or elsewhere. It is a crafted object and as such has value as a craft art object in addition to the contents of its text. Used books obviously can also have value and worth as a craft art object and from their age, being first editions, special editions, signed editions, etc. A printed book is a collectible, with new books being one type of collectible and used books another, with the different iterations of cover art they may have, including different art from different countries, having additional value as display and historic aspects.
None of which you get with e-books. While you can get a copy of the cover art and it may be the cover art particular to the e-book, you can also usually obtain that art on the Internet for free (which is a whole other issue.) E-books are not collectible objects, display objects or even (since older formats are not kept,) having a historic value. The only value is the actual text and the ability to transmit it to those who have bought access to it. If you resell an e-book, the text and formatting is identical, there is no difference in value, there is no other function. It?s just a stream of data. The only difference is the price paid for the access to download the stream of data. When the difference was buying the legal e-book or downloading the illegal, often bad quality pirated e-book, there was a value difference there besides the text itself. But with legal selling and reselling ? from the same vendors who supply your device with the same software, etc., there?s no difference. There?s no incentive for anyone buying the access to the e-book from the same vendor/broker to pay the vendor?s higher price for the exact same file. Amazon additionally has none of the costs for re-sold e-books that they do with brokering their used print books. And so it isn?t like the used print market at all and saying that it is, for me, is sticking your fingers in your ears and going ?nah nah, I can?t hear you.?
I don?t think re-selling is necessarily the end of the world. It may flatten out the e-book market considerably, it may not. It may have a big effect on electronic self-publishing. But it is part of the last twenty years efforts to shift the bulk of the money away from content providers and into the hands of the brokers like Amazon. It?s not exactly an author friendly policy. Will it, through word of mouth build, eventually bring in more readers than we have now? If that happens, it may have some successful effects. But if e-books simply replace print sales, (with access to books declining and with it education, and books becoming less visible so that people ignore them,) and does not grow the industry as a whole, and if the bulk of e-book sales does not provide the authors with income, then that?s not a situation most would look upon lovingly.
Source: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/02/07/second-hand-ebooks/
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