Of course the eBook revolution hasn’t changed the used book situation: it was perfectly legal and ethical for readers to buy used copies of books, although the sale did not benefit either author or publisher (and of course still doesn’t). The used book market certainly did affect sales of reissues of books. But the economics of publishing were in the way also: if an author dd something to call attention to a book that was no longer in print, by the time the publisher could get a copy into print and distributed and displayed for sale in the book stores the publicity had often died out and so did the interest; and a reader coming into a book store looking for a backlist book and not finding it had to order a copy (it it were still in print), and that’s a lot of trouble.

With eBooks, the backlist is all available at the click of a button and the store is always open, and it has been a lifesaver to a number of authors. Whatever changes get made in the law, I would hate to see it wipe out this new trend; but I think it won’t. Often people hear of a book and go look for it on Amazon or Nook, find it, and buy it. They ignore the (often badly formatted and horribly copy edited) pirate editions they may be tempted by in some search engines.

The situation as it stands is as good for authors are things have been in years — even in boom times very few authors had all their back lists displayed for sale at any given time. And as sales of book reading devices rise, sales of eBooks rises as well. Note that it’s not a BIG windfall (for most). But it is solid sales of 50 books a month for old titles, and that can be a godsend to aging authors…

Jerry Pournelle
Mote in God’s Eye, Lucifer’s Hammer, West of Honor, etc.

If we as a society can create this third model of “digital ownership” sooner rather than later, we can leave “rented media” behind, in what will be a comparatively small bucket of “non-transferrable assets”. For example, over the last 30 years, US consumers have invested, in 2012 dollars, on the order of a quarter-trillion dollars in physical CDs, each with crisp fair-use and first-sale rights. The comparative total investment in rented digital music in the last 8 years is on the order of 5% of that.

We should be thoughtful about railing against rights-holders for the legal rights (or lack thereof) of the digital music that consumers have (bought) rented. In theory, we consumers knew exactly what we were getting into. That is to say, the terms of the licenses we agreed to are not unclear. Of course folks can argue whether the average 18 year-old can and will read and understand all that legalese.

The ReDigi solution strives to expand the scopes of both legislative dicta and case-law. As Mr. Rosenblatt suggests, they’ve chosen a challenging mountain to climb. I’m not so sure I agree with his aside that it’s an odd position for them to take to enable first-sale-like rights AND bring the rights-holders in to participate as well. While this is indeed a deviation from what legislatures and judges have enabled, let’s be open-minded about asking questions like “why not?” as we attempt to sort out these thorny problems.

The fundamental challenge here (IMHO) is that most consumers of downloaded content assume they have fair-use and first-sale rights. They do not generally have those rights – whether or not they know with utter completeness what those two rights mean. Businesses like Murfie (disclosure: my employer) facilitate digital access of physical media, allowing consumers, for example, to continue extracting value from that $250B investment in CDs. Like the pre-Nixon US Treasury that operated on the gold standard, each disc streamed or downloaded at Murfie is backed by the physical compact disc that remains owned by its consumer and warehoused by us. Each and every day Murfie wrestles with these issues of ownership -vs- rental as we attempt to integrate all of our customers’ music purchases – physical or digital.

Shawn Broderick
Murfie.com

Content owners and creators are in danger of being exploited.

But somehow, despite everything on Netflix being out there for free via Usenet and torrents and what have you, Netflix and Spotify and Apple and Redbox and Vudu and HBO many others still make money.

Why? Because quality of experience and ease of discovery trumps free. I don’t want a folder full of Harry Potter ebooks. I want a service that maintains a massive library of titles, managed reader software and excellent discovery tools. The work is – quite nearly – incidental.

As far as re-selling files? It’s not really the issue. Collecting media objects is a habit that digital natives now in their teens never developed. For them, access > collecting.