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Apple and Amazon Flirt With a Market For Used Digital Items
langelgjm writes "The New York Times reports that Apple and Amazon are attempting to patent methods of enabling the resale of digital items like e-books and MP3s. Establishing a large marketplace for people to buy and sell used digital items has the potential to benefit consumers enormously, but copyright holders aren't happy. Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild, 'acknowledged it would be good for consumers — "until there were no more authors anymore."' But would the resale of digital items really be much different than the resale of physical items? Or is the problem that copyright holders just don't like resale?"
How about they just sell them for a reasonable price (ie. not equal to or more than physical books) at which point there would be no need for reselling.
Probably because used digital goods are more appealing than non digital used goods. If I buy a used book, pages may be torn, it might have writing inside "this is for Dave, thanks for being Dave", or it might have coffee stains. A used digital book has none of these problems. This is going to impact the market significantly. Why buy a new copy for $10 when I can buy an identical copy for $3?
Unless of course they figure out a way to add the coffee stains digitally. THEN we're talking.