I was surprised to learn I don’t own my ebooks. And neither do you. I know that’s no surprise to most of you. However, I’ve always been a late bloomer and I just came to the realization this past weekend that I don’t actually own my ebooks.
How did I come to this revelation? My wife and I are preparing to move and I was looking at all my books and taking mental inventory if I wanted to move all of them. Suddenly my mind made the leap to my ebooks. How do I resell the ones I don’t like or have no further use for? The answer I came to was I can’t.
Further investigation revealed that I don’t buy ebooks, and Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, don’t sell them. I am buying a lifetime use license, in effect. And at present there is no mechanism for me to resell the license. When Amazon, et al, sell me the license it is with the understanding I won’t resell.
So what do I do with all the ebooks I no longer want. I have dozens that I’ve read or started to read and don’t like. Sure I can delete them. But that is like throwing a five dollar bill in the toilet and pulling the lever to flush it. Why on earth do I want to do that?
The short answer is, I don’t. But right now, I’m stuck with all those ebooks I no longer want. Unless I just flush them down the toilet.
Some people have made the argument that buying an ebook is like going to the movie theater. If I don’t like the movie, I’m just stuck with a bad experience. The same with ebooks. I’m just stuck with a bad book.
Most young people, it seems, don’t find this strange. I think this is because the entertainment industry has brainwashed them (because they grew up with all this digital content) into thinking that reselling digital content is wrong. But how is digital content any different than a paperback book? There is no difference, really. It’s all content.
Oh, sure the argument is made that books are fragile and deteriorate. Which is hogwash. I have perfectly readable books that are over a 100 years old. However, I have all manner of digital content I can no longer use because I no longer have the readers to read it. Digital content is extremely fragile.
Just think about what happens when mobi and epub books can no longer be read. And since technology is rapidly advancing, that could be in my lifetime — and I’m 65. Remember floppy discs?
What guarantee do I have that my latest tablet will let me read the old digital content? I have none. Because someone somewhere will probably want to make money to convert my old books into the new formats. And if publishers want to convert their old digital format content to new formats, that will be up to them. If they don’t, that content is lost and gone forever. Just think of all those books, that are ebooks only, and they don’t get converted. Gone. At least with paper, they still exist. All the books. The good, the bad, the ugly.
So the argument that digital files don’t deteriorate is misleading. They might simply become unreadable. Which is tantamount to deterioration. It has the same end result.
Now what to my wondering and searching eye should appear? But that Amazon (as of at least 2 plus years ago) is working on creating a used ebook market. And in 2014, a Dutch court ruled that Dutch company Tom Kabinet could continue to resell digital content because the company actually was operating in a gray area of the law.
This is how it could work if Amazon created a used ebook market for Kindle. I have an ebook I no longer want. I offer it for sale in the used marketplace. When I get a buyer, Amazon takes a cut of the sale price — and may pass a cut onto the publisher, as an inducement to get their agreement to resell — and then deletes the item off my Kindle and transfers it to the new owner of the use license. In effect, I’m selling my use of the book to someone else.
Personally, I like this idea. The main argument against a used ebook market is that it will drive down the cost of new ebooks. But I don’t see the Big 5 lowering book prices simply because there are libraries and used bookstores. So I’m inclined to think the argument is a non sequitur that ebook prices will fall by force if there is a used market. After all, new books have to be sold for there to be used books.
As a publisher of my own content, I would get paid for the sale of the new book AND get a cut of the resale price. To my mind, that is a win-win. Sure I wouldn’t get the new book price on the resale, but maybe that person wouldn’t buy my book new to begin with. But if they buy my book used and like it, I could reap benefits down the line.
I hope Amazon goes through with this project. I think it will benefit readers immensely. And, if publishers get a cut of the resale price, it will help indie author-publishers as well.
As always, comments are welcome; and, until next time, happy reading!
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All too true, Christopher and Jack! An ‘ebook’ isn’t really a book at all. And you can’t flush it down the toilet unless it’s a virtual toilet…
…but can you throw it at a digital cat?
And can the digital cat catch a computer mouse?
An ebook is certainly not a book in the sense that we’ve thought of books for the past several thousand years.
BTW, you never really delete your ebooks, they remain in your account in ‘the cloud,’ to be accessed if you choose. Yes, Amazon or B&N may go out of business, and take your books with them, but for now, the only way to send your books ‘down the toilet’ is to delete your account(s) altogether, which I assume you are not doing.
Thanks for the clarification!
I like the idea of a used book market, but in a sense something similar is already happening, just not in the way to which you are referring.
In the file-sharing world, people are stripping DRM from book files and sharing with others. No, it is not legal, and as an author, I imagine you do not support such activities, but it *is* going on, quite successfully and aggressively.
I do think if previously-owed ebooks were legally allowed to be sold openly, it would reduce the audience for file-sharing.
Just my two cents.
(Amazon isn’t the only driver here, though… it comes down to resistance from the big publishers, too.)
Yes, there is the “black market” so to speak. But it would be nice to have this all legal and above board. And yes, the Big 5 do not want this. Which is why I think the Zon was making a kickback to the publishers part of the deal.
A sad commentary that will sadly be dismissed with very little notice by the current generation who won’t understand what you’re talking about. I’m 69. You and I remember a day when retailers, manufacturers, and service providers were driven by pride of product and a deep desire to do the right thing. Modern companies are driven by money, and the few firms left who try to exhibit integrity are considered mismanaged outliers who are headed for bankruptcy. No team of think-tankers has burned the midnight oil in at least the last quarter-century trying to think of ways to make your experience better.
As a big Xbox fan, allow me to share the gamers’ analogy. Time was when I would go to the game store and purchase a game. What I got was a compact disc that I would take home, place in my console, and the game would appear and function adequately on my television. I owned it, and if I wanted to share a superlative game with you, I would hand you the disc which you would take home and play on your own console. The next generation of consoles had on-line capability which gave us on-line gaming. Gamers thought that was generally good, though it had its problems, but the insidious part was that they began to sell incomplete games. You would come to a point in the narrative when it was virtually impossible to progress further without purchasing DLC (downloadable content) with your credit card. Then we got on-line registry. When I put my disc in my console, the first thing it showed me was a registration screen. Now if I gave you my registered disc to take home, you’d put it in your machine, which would then ask you to pay for it again before you could play it. Fast forward to today, and you don’t get a game when you buy one, you get a disc that tells the on-line service that you’ve bought a copy of that game, and they then stream it to you whenever you want to play. If they decide they want to add more pay-to-play parameters down the line somewhere, you have no say in it; it’s pay or don’t play. My daughter and I have a bookshelf full of games, and play together several times a week, but all these things combined are the reason that we don’t have a single title that was released later than the late 2000s.
All that’s fine, nobody has to play video games, and our solution was to stop purchasing any game from any company that acts like that, but reading is another matter. Does any devoted reader feel like they could quit reading new books in protest, and just read the old ones over and over again? You’ve put your finger right on a serious problem: All of these companies, from the auto manufacturers to the guy who makes disposable gloves, have us strapped to the rack; the American rack. Note the difference: the European rack is horizontal. They strap you to it and stretch you until your joints come apart. The American rack is vertical. They hang you up by your ankles and shake you until no more money falls out.
They have us, brother. The last couple of generations have allowed this avalanche of “gimme-gimme-gimme” to get started, and it won’t be stopped easily; almost certainly not in our lifetime.
All right, rant over. We now return control of your blog to you…
Those days of our youth are, sad to say, long gone. The pursuit of the green seems to dominate everything. Even many of our fellow writers are obsessed with making money, and pretty much nothing else.
I’ve thought long and hard about the way our business is going. I’m not opposed to anyone making money. Because we need the stuff. And sad to say, many of our fellow writers, in their headlong quest for the almighty dollar, spend vast sums of money to get more money.
In the four years I’ve been self-publishing I’ve seen the price of ebooks by indie authors steadily climb. I think this is a direct result of writers pursuing money. They want more money to fill their wallets so they can quit the day job and because they spend so much money to produce their books they have to raise the price to pass on those costs to their readers. So the reader is paying for extravagent production costs and greed.
We’ve pointed out over and over again that one can produce an ebook for next to nothing. But the greed drives writers to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars for editors, formatters, proofreaders, and cover designers, and then hundreds and thousands more for advertising. All to buy a fan base. As a reader, I refuse to pay for greed and excessive business costs. For one, because I don’t have the money to help them buy their dream.
I read to be entertained and to gain information. Fiction written by good authors can be had for just a few dollars. I rebel at the fact that I don’t own the ebook. But I’m willing to pay to help support and encourage good authors who don’t have a huge bank account to finance their writing endeavor. I’m showcasing some of those authors on my Facebook page and profile.
We readers need to be selective. We need to not feed the greed. Another reason I think a used ebook market is a good thing.
Thanks for stopping by. Take over my blog anytime.