http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/55849-amazon-poised-to-sell-used-e-books.html (http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/55849-amazon-poised-to-sell-used-e-books.html)
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When I first read that headline, I was :towubbahuh: , but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. There are Obviously a lot of ebooks that are overpriced and that leads to some people not buying ebooks at all or resorting to pirating the ebooks. Not buying or pirating has the same result, no money being made by Amazon or the writer/publisher. Now, if you are someone who doesn't pirate, but doesn't buy because of steep prices, maybe you decide to buy that ebook for $9.99 if you know you can recoup $3.99 of that at a latter date. If you are the person who pirates because of prices, maybe you decide to buy if you can resell, or maybe you buy the used ebook at the reduced price. In the long run I thin this leads to more ebook sales. DTB publishers probably don't like the idea though. Also, the folks who pirate everything because they can aren't a factor in this at all. They will always be there not buying the ebooks.
Personally I think this would get me to pirate less. I do buy a lot of ebooks ( I think I read more of the ones I buy that the ones I've pirated) and would love to be able to sell/transfer the licence I have on quite a few of them as I know I will never want to read them again. There are plenty of books I've purchased that I will read again and I like having them in the Amazon Cloud, so I can add them to all my digital devices at will.
The easier companies make it to purchase you digital content, the more people will purchases it. I know Adobe got me to become a Creative Cloud subscriber by offer all their products for a reasonable/affordable monthly payment. I wish HBO would offer non subscribers the ability to get HBO Go, so I could support GoT more (I do by the DVDs). Amazon may be setting a trend in the digital marketplace.
That really is a good idea. I've often wished that I could somehow turn in my paper version of a book for an e-copy and get a big discount, but I don't think they have any incentive to offer that sort of deal.
My used e-book had slight foxing on the edges and a crazy person had highlighted various passages
:P
You can highlight e-book passages, BTW.
If you bought the book from Amazon you can see passages that others who have bought the book have highlighted too, if you want.