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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?

I do not believe that publishers deserve to get paid for anything after the sale. We already have an existing mechanism to prevent the second half of that question from happening: it's called copyright. It is illegal for me to make a copy and distribute that copy, at least for any book published in the last 95 years (and honestly, that period is itself way too long).

That there is a vibrant secondhand market for textbooks in particular is a testament to the failures of publishers to make their retention desirable. I hold no sympathy for them, and I bristle at the notion that they deserve to be recompensed for their mistakes.

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The side-effect of this kind of attitude is that the purchaser must capitalize the whole price of a book or work. Right now, if a student buys a textbook, the student pays full price and then recoups some later by reselling it.

The goal of this current scheme is to lower the initial cost by spreading out the fees among everyone who uses a copy. In an ideal version of this model, a textbook that normally costs $100 could be sold for $10 and then used for ten years. The publisher still gets $100 but the students only need to pay $10 each.

That's great, except that's never happened.

For example, digital games also do not have the ability to resell them, but they aren't inherently cheaper to compensate for this. This is because creative works are not priced cost-plus, they are priced by perceived value.

Insamuch as digital textbooks will be cheaper than physical, it will be purely a psychological pricing thing rather than a function of the publisher's expected profit. If that $100 textbook was $90 used, the digital copy will be $85, even though the publisher would still get the same total revenue selling them for $10. They will bank on students not accounting for the used market at the end of the semester lowering their total costs (or students not having extra cashflow to lock up in textbooks).

> The goal of this current scheme is to lower the initial cost by spreading out the fees among everyone who uses a copy. In an ideal version of this model, a textbook that normally costs $100 could be sold for $10 and then used for ten years. The publisher still gets $100 but the students only need to pay $10 each.

What would almost certainly happen is the publisher still sells it for $100 initially, and then gets $10 for each of the resales. I mean, look at the effect that ebooks (which skip the costs of printing the textbooks!) had on textbook prices, or, rather, the lack of effect.

But this is already not happening. Textbook publishers are already giving students a choice to either buy a textbook outright or "rent" it for dramatically lower. This is already happening with physical books. I'm sure the publishers (at least some of them) would love to come up with some similar scheme with digital books.

On the contrary, there's no reason to believe the exorbitant initial cost would change at all. If anything, this would make it worse.

The reason textbooks can cost as much as they do is that demand is very inelastic - students don't have any real alternatives to purchasing textbooks (in most cases.) As a result, there's little downward pressure on textbook prices.

Without any reason to lower prices, publishers would absolutely take this opportunity to maximize profits by raising secondhand prices and taking most or all of the difference. Students will be forced to buy them anyway, so why wouldn't they?

There are plenty of reasons to believe it. Publishers are already "renting" printed textbooks to students for a term for a dramatically lower price. I'm sure they would love to do the same with digital copies.

and copyright is already holding back our culture insanely without blockchain DRM

do away with copyright and guarantee everyone a decent standard of living.

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