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I want: Amazon Ebook Exchange

D

dpopiz

Diamond Member
Wouldn't it be cool if amazon had their entire collection in ebook format and they had the same marketplace for buying and selling used ebooks like they have for real books?

imagine:
You want a few good books on some topic, so you buy a bunch of ebooks that look good on amazon used books. You receive your books practially instantly with no shipping costs. Then say you "flip" through your ebooks and decide that a few of them aren't any good. You just relist them on amazon used books as quickly and easily as you bought them, and your spent money is soon replaced when somebody buys your used ebooks.

In short the advantages are:
- being able to look through books and find some info you need instantly, instead of waiting a week or two and completely losing whatever inspiration you had
- saving shipping costs
 
Good idea, but a couple of problems:
* It needs very strong Digital Rights Management, possibly even tied to a custom protected OS (such as on a 6x9 table PC "book").
* Even with DRM, few if any of the copyright holders would agree to making licenses transferrable, except possibly if a second fee was paid. Publishers hate the used book market since it costs them sales.

It would be great though -- instant books, cheap.
 
Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
Good idea, but a couple of problems:
* It needs very strong Digital Rights Management, possibly even tied to a custom protected OS (such as on a 6x9 table PC "book").
* Even with DRM, few if any of the copyright holders would agree to making licenses transferrable, except possibly if a second fee was paid. Publishers hate the used book market since it costs them sales.

It would be great though -- instant books, cheap.
Click to expand...

yeah....I guess the publishers really wouldn't want to support that....maybe. but how does it work today with real books? don't used books promote the sale of new books in a way? I mean if a bunch of people get ahold of a particular book via the used book channels, eventually the channels will run out of used copies of that book. But then all the people who thought it was a really good book will tell their friends and drive the sales of more new copies.

The same would apply with ebooks.


as for DRM: it's a tough problem, but what I don't understand is why they worry so much more about ebooks. Isn't it *almost* as easy to scan a book and OCR it and distribute it illegally?
 
as for DRM: it's a tough problem, but what I don't understand is why they worry so much more about ebooks. Isn't it *almost* as easy to scan a book and OCR it and distribute it illegally?
Click to expand...
Not really. If there was a DRM cracker on warez sites, you download it once, you point it at a file and start infringing in 5 seconds, no effort at all.

Your way requires cutting away the binding and feeding in the pages one by one, unless you spend a large chunk of money on a sheet feeder. Even then you must feed it all in again and have a program to weave together pages, unless you have a really expensive duplexing sheet feeder.

How many people would be sharing their CDs if besides your PC you needed a special "CD scanner" that cost $1,000+?

Also, physical books only create one used book per sale, but without DRM any one ebook sale can create an infinite supply of perfect copies. And ebooks are small, a fraction of the size of a single MP3 song so very little bandwidth is needed to "share" them.
 
Originally posted by: HermDogg
DaveSimmons seems to know a lot about sharing/illegally copying eBooks... 😕

Just sayin 😉
Click to expand...
LOL, no. I know a little about the book business because my previous job was a software developer at a small college textbook publisher (MicroCase) that sold workbooks bundled with statistcal analysis software we developed (also MicroCase).

 
well, what I'm talking about is one person scanning the book into a pdf or whatever and then distributing it all over. That's not any harder than distributing an ebook except that one person has to initially scan it do it's in a digital form.
 
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