The news that Amazon was last week granted a patent on technology to allow the resale of digital goods such as music and ebooks has sent ripples of concern through the publishing community. As John Rickards point out, getting a patent for something and actually acting on it are two different things.
But the idea of secondhand ebooks manages to seem both ridiculous and terrifying at the same time. Said Chris Taylor-Davis to author Nick Harkaway on Twitter today:
@Harkaway no advantage to authors, slight discount to customer, double sale for Amazon. Reselling digital goods makes no sense to me
I have always wondered why Amazon didn’t do this. For me a lot depends on the price. I have about 50 books on equity and options trading that I bought in the past year or so. Some are under $20, but the vast majority of them are $50+ each book. That’s roughly $2,000. I purposely bought the physical book as it is real easy for me to re-sell them on Amazon.
On Xbox live I must have 100 or so digital games that I downloaded. Can’t sell them either.
Not sure how this would ever work in porn as all of these are tied to certain devices via DRM.