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Comment by underdeserver | Hacker News Reader

All money and interest is not enough.

If sign a contract that you will provide me a service and you back out of it midway, I'm usually worse off than if you had declined the engagement in advance. For example, if I contract you to build me a house, it takes six months, and three months in you decide to back out and pay me back with interest, I still have half a house I need to demolish or else I have to find someone who would continue your work (which I likely won't find), and I'm out 3 months' rent.

I would expect additional compensation.

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This doesn't transfer well into this example though. You could argue that if you lose a library of 100+ books you also lose information on what those books even where, but a better solution for that would be to just demand some machine-generated list of what you had so you can buy them again somewhere else.

There's other lost value. What if a book is out of print or out of publishing? What if you had comments? What if you had bookmarks?

What if you brought your Kindle on a two-month-long hiking trip to South America and they don't sell them over there?

I'm doubtful that you would get additional compensation in your hypothetical example.

You're not worse off if you didn't spend anything and you are half-way towards your goal of having a house.

"You're not worse off if you didn't spend anything and you are half-way towards your goal of having a house. "

Contractors hate taking over someone elses' half-done work, as they now have to deal with someone else's shortcuts without knowing what they are.

100% I would. It's pretty easy to show damages, and I would take the contractor to court. Also, I believe these contracts have breakout clauses that define exactly how much I would get, too.

(This goes both ways, of course - if I back off the deal and have the contractor stop all work, I usually have to pay in full anyway.)

Seems like it would fall under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel ?

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