A Penny for Your Books

This implies Chaucer isn't lowbrow...

Edit - Anyhow, as for the rest of the article, it's an interesting look into the trade of used books. I'm glad that people are given a chance to give these books a second life and spare the landfill, and there definitely is something comforting about reading from an actual paper book (I definitely prefer them to digital). Maybe it's the sense of permanence, vs. bytes which are all too easy to delete?

Back in the day, horology went through the "quartz crisis" when quartz watches entered the market. The pendulum swung back, and mechanical watches are magnitudes more expensive and desirable than their quartz cousins.

Audio went through the same thing - digital replaced analog and became exceedingly cheap. Now the good money is in vacuum tube amps; good record players cost thousands, and people pine for the warmth of analog.

I imagine the same will happen here. Maybe not to the same degree... But that penny analog book probably still costs several hundred times for the digital download. E-books are a convenience and the way of the future. But purists will always hold onto books, and rare books will become more and more valuable. The dog-eared copy of Huck Finn that's worth $10 today will be worth magnitudes tomorrow after the pendulum swings back.

Technology disrupts right up until people have a crisis of nostalgia, and realize all isn't inconvenience in an analog world.

There is a rather large subset of society that consists of creatives, and for the most part those cursed with creative passions tend to perform economically poorly. I suspect that this is in part due to the selling of used creative goods (music, books, movies, etc). Most importantly the concept of used books may itself devalue the medium in people's minds. Much like what happened to mobile apps; things that used to be several dollars or more on the desktop are $0.99 on mobile. The idea of a $20 app is offensive to people. The idea of spending full price on a book is also, perhaps, offensive to a large number of people.

All that said, even if getting rid of used books was economically beneficial to those writing the books, there still seems to be no practical way to achieve it. So it's really just a thought experiment driven by hopeful desire to help those around me who are more artistically inclined and suffering as a result.

Perhaps the right solution is to come at it from a different angle. Subscription services seem to be one solution that is working in the sense that it gets those who normally pirate content to pony up for convenience. Though that doesn't seem to translate into greater income for the content creators...

With print books, publishers risk undermining their own inventory. The more print books they sell, the more they fuel the used market, which drives down prices. This is countervailing force to the typical upward price pressure of high demand.

Not so with ebooks. Plus you don't have to cut down trees, stamp them with poisonous dyes, and move them around with oil-sucking cargo ships, frieghtliners, forklifts and such.

If only ebooks didn't suck so bad...

Estimating the U.S. population at 320 million, that's about 8.4 books per person per year -- higher than I would have expected.