On Dec 21, 2004, at 1:02 PM, Damon Agretto wrote:
want readers to be able to offer *used* eBooks for sale, which would sell for something less than their original price, some of which would go back to us, the rest to the seller, who could then apply those credits toward *more* book purchases.
The rest I can't comment on, but this above perked my interest. How, exactly, do you define a *used* e-book?
One that's been bought and read. ;)
As a reader my chief objection to an eBook is that I can't legally sell it to someone else. The DRM on it has it licensed to me, in perpetuity. So if I blow $25.00 on Stephen King's latest** and discover it's equal in quality to _It_, I've just wasted a quarter of a C-note with nothing to show for it but 4 or so MB of unusable, and quite literally unreadable, space on my drive.
As a publisher I'd like to see if there's a way to address that problem.
So why even bother buying an all new copy to begin with, when you pal Joe has a copy on his reader he'll sell you for a couple bucks?
You've hit the crux of it. Why bother, indeed, buying a new *paper* book if you can get the same title, gently used, for half the cover price? This is what makes it difficult to be a publisher and *great* to be a bookstore, particularly those that handle used titles. Amazon's making a *fortune* (well, not, but still...) as a vendor of used copies of my programming book, but neither I nor Osborne/McGraw-Hill are seeing a cent of those sales. Which, believe me, sucks.
The idea here is that I would have a proprietary system in place that handles DRM and allows purchased titles to be sold used to other readers. Once you sell a title to someone else, that specific copy on your system is deregistered. You can buy another copy; that's fine. But the one you had is gone and can't be brought back. However, the other person has paid less than new for the book. You get some credit for selling it, which can be used toward the purchase of new titles *or other used* titles. Meanwhile my proprietary system is taking a percentage of the sales.
That way my system gets some of the profit -- which as a publisher is something I like -- while you can sell your eBooks when you're done with them -- which is something you like -- and other readers don't have to pay full cover price for a title -- which is something they like.
At least that's the model. I'm not sure how many resells an eBook should have -- I mean, should there be a limit? Is it sold at half its purchase value each time? If so, once the price drops to one "credit", that's it -- maybe ten of those could be bundled together by a reader and sold for one as a remainder bin type thing or something.
There's also the possibility of a book check-out like a library. You get to check out one "copy" of a title for, say, a week, to read and decide if you want to buy it. If so, maybe you get to buy it at a discount.
To make a gentle disconnect between actual money and final product in the user's mind, my idea is to have a point or credit system; you buy, say, 20 credits for US$10.00. Most books you want might cost ten credits each. Well, you're not thinking any more in terms of paying $5.00 for a title. And if you buy a book new for 10 credits and can then resell it for 5, 4 of which go to you and 1 of which goes back to the system...
Also, how would you police this? What's to stop me from downloading a book and selling it to my friends (besides normal copyright laws, which are not always obeyed anyway). SOme sort of file lock? This is an honest question.
Yep, DRM. Registration not too dissimilar from what's in place now for most electronic purchase formats. It's not the data that would be enciphered per se; there'd likely be some kind of registration key involved. Though scrambling the data itself is certainly another possibility.
To threadjack a little, as I mentioned I D-L some OOP gaming products. I want to print these out and rebind into a hardback format. Anyone know if a place like Kinko's or Staples do something like this? I want something that I can put on my bookshelf, so spiral bound or in a notebook are out. Cost is definitely a concern, since if its too expensive, I could just buy it off of ebay and get an original...
If the material is not copyrighted or is GPL, you can consider using lulu.com -- they allow you to PDF-ify a document and then do a POD production of it on your own. You could do that and then order a copy or two for yourself. The end result's pretty decent, a bound trade paperback.
Also I believe Cafe Press (cafepress.com) offers a similar product.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
** I'll cop to being a King fan, but his work is inconsistent.
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