According to Passive Guy's site, they are coming:

 

"At a time when many independent booksellers both here and abroad are beginning to gain traction selling Kobo e-books, other retailers are eyeing the secondary market for e-books and other digital content. Boston-based ReDigi, which opened a used digital music storefront in late 2011, may have gotten there first, but megaretailer Amazon isn’t far behind"

 

How do you feel about this?  My reaction is that it will kill off all but bestselling authors again.

The revolution of self-publishing will be over.

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Your quote is from an article in Publisher's Weekly. Did you read it?

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/artic...

I don't see how anyone planning to sell "used ebooks" (the concept baffles me) is going to get around the copyright laws.

Didn't read it. I assume PG did.  Their argument is that you can resell something you have bought. If Amazon embraces this with their side-by-side posting of new and old prices, the end is in sight.

They're selling  licenses. If I buy an e-book, all I'm really getting is a license to have it on my Kindle. If I pay $9.99 read it, read it, and sell it back to Amazon for $2.99, they get the license back. Assuming they re-sell the license for more than $2.99, they make money, and don't have to pay the publisher for another license, which probably costs substantially more than $2.99.

Basically, everyone gets hosed except Amazon. This strikes me as a true race to the bottom strategy.

Exactly.

But we should still have the right to refuse permission to Amazon. As far as I can see we haven't given away our rights. They are merely the distributors. We have set the price.

I doubt it. Amazon will look at i as the same as someone who re-sells a paper book. The auhtor has no say over that.

I don't know, Dana. The fact that they have been offered the right to publish the novel does not give them the right to exploit it. At no point was the idea of resale mentioned. Aren't all the titles protected against downloads to other people?

Hmm. Is that what the DRM is all about? Konrath insist that we should allow sharing. Hah.  We may have to reconsider.

New and confusing territory.

You might as well make your books DRM-free because it is stupid easy to break the DRM anyway.

Yes, but how many people know this?

It really speaks to intent. If your books have DRM then you're stating pretty clearly that you don't want them shared. If the books are DRM-free then you're saying you don't mind if they're shared.

It's true, the people who break the DRM don't care what you have to say about the books you wrote, at least everyone is clear about what's going on.

People who are very good at shoplifting would say that it's, "stupid easy to shoplift." And stores accept a certain amount of shoplifting as the cost of doing business but they don't leave the doors unlocked overnight.

(having said that, I don't care if my books are protected in any way or not)

 

 

Amazon won't be able to re-sell the e-book unless a reader sells it back. At that point they are no longer serving as the publisher, but as a used book store. It's a little like is Penguin opened a used  book store. Whatever legal obligation they had to the author expired when they paid your royalty.

If Amazon embraces this with their side-by-side posting of new and old prices, the end is in sight.

The end of what?

For me, it means that self-publishing will no longer pay.

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