I’m a classic early adopter; no doubt about it. But I don’t have a Kindle yet and I’m not getting one anytime soon. Why? Because Amazon won’t let us resell e-Books the way it lets us resell physical books.
Right now the way I read most books is I buy them used, read them, and then resell them. I pay a bit for shipping and seller fees but not much: I usually recoup most of what I paid for each book.
I’m hopeful that Amazon will eventually encourage and support resale of its e-books because I believe that such a policy can sell more devices, provide more money for publishers and authors, and improve society (by encouraging more people to read) in an environmentally sustainable way.
From a technical perspective, the fact that e-Books are digital (and can be reproduced in large numbers “for free”) need not preclude Amazon.com from facilitating their resale. It is incredibly easy for Amazon’s computers to simultaneously delete a title from a seller’s Kindle and authorize it on a buyer’s Kindle.
Rather, it seems to be a business model, publisher relations, and customer education issue.
If Amazon.com were to sell “used” e-Books (an interesting philosophical concept) alongside “new” e-Books it would obviously cut into the sale of the “new” ones. But this not be a problem for publishers or authors because Amazon could collect a cut of each resale and share it with the publisher.
For example, Amazon sells an e-book “new” for $10. That person later sells it “used” for $5. Amazon takes $1 for itself and $1 for the publisher. The original buyer recoups $3 and effectively pays $7 to read the book.
The second person sells it “used” for $4. Amazon takes $1 for itself and $1 for the publisher. The original buyer recoups $2 and effectively paid $2 to read the book.
Over the following year the same book is bought and sold a dozen times. Amazon profits on every transaction, the publisher gets paid more than a dozen times, and each reader pays about $2 to read the book.
If the pricing is done properly, Amazon and the publisher collect more money, and more people get to read each book, because many people who would not pay $10 or $8 to read a particular book are willing to pay $6 or $4 or $2 or whatever the market dictates.
Additionally, more people like me would gladly buy "new" e-Books for $10 because we'd know that we could likely sell it for $8 or $7 a few weeks later. Price discrimination would happen more based on book quality because the quality of books would translate nicely into resale prices through a constant (hopefully liquid) market.
Lastly, every time a sale happens the book would be transferred digitally without the need for a seller to wrap it and have the post office drive it to a buyer’s house.
I suspect that if Amazon does not create a secondary market for e-Books, some other publisher is going to do so, and it attract a lot of new users like me who love to read but aren't keen on paying the relatively high prices Amazon is now asking for what is nothing more than a glorified book rental -- something we can get for free at our local libraries.
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