Re: thought for the week

On 8/10/99, Jeroen Hellingman <jehe[_at_]kabelfoon.nl> wrote:
>
> You will be pleased to know how wonderful web sites like
> http://www.bibliofind.com/ help me to locate books I would like to
> have, however, the copyright holder is not earning anything from these
> second hand books, so I think it is quite irrelevant to them, and I
> think it is also irrelevant to my proposal on abandonment.

I think the notion that copyright holders "don't earn anything from second hand books" is perhaps oversimplistic.

If there were no possibility of re-selling a new book once you had read it, or tired of it, many people would be less willing to purchase the book in the first place.

The very existence of a secondhand marketplace, by lowering the cost of acquisition of new books (by making such acquisition effectively a rental; you pay the difference between what you paid for the book and what you get for it when you sell it as "rent" for the time during which you own it) may foster new-book purchases; it therefore would be of substantial benefit to copyright holders; they are effectively "paid in advance" for multiple resales of the same work. Because of the existence of the used book market, new books might either sell more copies than they otherwise would, sell at higher prices than they otherwise would, or both. Even someone who has never sold a book in his life might well be comforted by the notion that he can if he wants to, and reluctant to purchase a book that could not be resold.

I recognize, of course, that this is an empirical question: but it is not so simple, as some would have it, that every sale of a used book is a lost sale of a new book, or that the used book market is irrelevant to the sales of new books.

-Ari

Ari Kahan
<akahan[_at_]netcom.com>