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Comment by robterrell | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm... he says that Amazon doesn't pay publishers enough for the lending library. How much does my local library pay publishers for the same dead-tree book? Cover price, right? And nothing for each reader? Actually, they probably pay the volume discount price, not even cover price.

I like to see him argue this from the ground up. Start with the local-library model: why should Amazon pay anything for book lending? Aside from the fact that technology has made it possible?

As I recall from the three books I wrote, authors don't get crap from discount, book club, or library sales.

Is the publisher is trying to make a little extra margin for itself, by demanding a fee for loaned books? Will a standard author's contract now include an author's cut of these lending fees?

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Technology, economics, and society don't develop independent of each other. Due to physical distribution constraints, there were artificial limits on how widely a single book copy could be distributed. Hence, simplest system that compensated all parties appropriately, was the the policy of a fixed fee to individual buyer and library (the "first sale doctrine" may also apply here).

Now, with the Internet allowing practically infinite lending, should the policy be different? Probably.

Think about it the dual of your though experiment: if lending libraries were invented in a world with effortless, almost-infinite lending among a 25-million-or-so "library", don't you think per-usage charges would be an automatic feature?

Btw,AFAIK DVD rentals work this way: Netflix can't rent out more than 100 times or so before paying for a new copy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

If Netflix wanted to go to Best Buy and buy dvds and lend them out they legally could, but that doesn't stop the content providers from being able to make other deals like this. It easily could be worth it for netflix if the dvds need to be replaced less than every 100 viewings on average.

> Now, with the Internet allowing practically infinite lending, should the policy be different? Probably.

Well sure. The question is whether something that has no inherent cost (electronic duplication) should have an artificial cost imposed on it for no apparent reason. The answer is clearly no.

> Btw,AFAIK DVD rentals work this way: Netflix can't rent out more than 100 times or so before paying for a new copy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Any DVD purchaser can lend them, just as any book purchaser can lend them. This has been litigated.

>Any DVD purchaser can lend them, just as any book purchaser can lend them. This has been litigated.

He means that the DVD wears out after 100 or so views, so Netflix must buy a new one. In other words, the DVD is not an infinite good.

The local library pays proportionally to the number of simultaneous readers it wants to be able to handle for the book. For popular books the library will by more than one copy.

This breaks the analogy between Amazon's library and local physical book libraries.

If the library is paying a bulk/discounted price such that the author's cut of the price for each book sold is effectively zero, then it doesn't matter how many books they pay for simultaneously. A billion times zero is still zero.

In the UK at least the library also pays a per-loan (a few *10c) to the author.

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