It is an interesting phenomenon. According to a vocal group of ebook devotees, publishers must change their business model or die because they are not giving ebook consumers what they want: very inexpensive, perfectly edited and formatted, DRM-free ebooks released no later than the day that the hardcover version is released. Fail to give me what I want, then off with your head!
Amidst all this posturing there is a deafening silence from the publishers.
No industry changes overnight, so it is certain that publishers aren’t going to change their business model tomorrow just because a handful of people demand it. It’s like the digital rights management (DRM) argument. There is a group of Kindlers who demand that Amazon do away with DRM. If Amazon isn’t lying through its teeth, Kindles and Kindle edition ebooks with DRM are selling like hotcakes with few complaints about Kindle’s DRM and Amazon goes merrily on its own DRM way. Why? Because the clamor for no DRM is really a hoarse whisper. There are a handful of objectors out of the universe of ebook buyers. But the anger of the devotees, as few as they may be in number, continues and becomes increasingly strident, with neither side willing to “hear” the other.
How did we get to this point in the nascent war about ebooks? What is it that makes each side in the debate so planted in concrete that rational discourse is impossible?I haven’t quite put my finger on the cause of this dissatisfaction other than recognizing it as the birth child of the Internet. A colleague who lambasts book publishers for their DRM and pricing, merrily goes along with his cable TV bill, even though he has no choice regarding TV provider but can choose from among myriad publishers, some with and some without DRM and bojectionable pricing. Similarly, I go merrily along with publishers’ use of DRM and exercise my right to not buy a DRMed book, but I vigorously protest any attempt by cable to increase my TV cost. Perhaps the difference is that with ebooks I have a choice but with cable TV I don’t; there is competition in the ebook world, whereas there is no competition in the cable TV world, so I feel helpless in the latter but empowered in the former.
But perhaps we are at this point because of a more fundamental issue: The Age of the Internet has birthed a belief among some consumers that they are entitled to everything they want when they want it at a price they want to pay. This strikes me as being particularly true in the arguments of the ebookers. Although they demand, the questions remain: What entitles them to an ebook version of a book? What entitles them to a price threshold of $9.99? What entitles them to a DRM-free ebook? What entitles them to simultaneous release of an ebook and a hardcover?
Granted that the market can dictate terms. Eventually, the ebook market may require publishers to do away with DRM, release all book formats simultaneously, price no ebook higher than $9.99, and the like, but market-forced changes are significantly different than demands based on beliefs of entitlement. Entitlement says I have rights that are more valuable than your rights (or that you have no rights), whereas market-forced change says we both have rights and they are equally valuable, but one of us will give way because the market forced it.
I don’t know how this will shakeout, but it is clear to me that all parties will need to compromise. The ebookers have thrown down the gauntlet, the publishers need to pick it up and accept the challenge. Simply because some ebookers have decided that publishers have no role to play in the future ebook world doesn’t make it so. Publishers need to redefine themselves in 21st century terms, not rehash 20th century concepts.
Publishers do have a role to play, even if it is nothing more than preventing publishing from becoming wholly anarchic. But until publishers define their role in an ebook world, the call to off their heads will continue. If the call remains unchallenged long enough, it will become self-fullfilling, with publishers having no one to blame but themselves.
Editor’s Note: The above is reprinted, with permission, from Rich Adin’s An American Editor blog. PB
That’s a heady editorial. 🙂
Personally, my complaint with large publishers’ positions on ebooks is their continual attempt to reduce the value of what they sell me (no right of first sale, restrictions on fair use, no universal annotations, etc.) due to DRM, without explaining to me what they’re giving me in compensation (searchability, dictionary support, what?) Heaven forfend they should think about reducing the price to go along with lesser value!
In the end, they’ll lose the DRM battle, simply due to the nature of electronic data. In the interim, they seem to be eager to inconvenience me, without making it up with other things I value. That slowly kills any customer good will. Eventually, the publisher winds up on the bad side of a costly line. Since there are good examples of small publishers who get the job done right, there’s no easy path back to customer good will.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
“very inexpensive, perfectly edited and formatted, DRM-free ebooks released no later than the day that the hardcover version is released.”
Hey, that sounds like Baen. Guess why they get my money?
Amidst all this posturing there is a deafening silence from the publishers.
Businesses tend to be silent when when having to fire staff and cut costs because they are going bankrupt. Failing business models are hard to acknowledge.
Jack said, “Personally, my complaint with large publishers’ positions on ebooks is their continual attempt to reduce the value of what they sell me (no right of first sale, restrictions on fair use, no universal annotations, etc.) due to DRM, ”
“The First Sale Doctrine” applies only to paper books, not digital books.
The First Sale Doctrine Defined:
“First Sale Doctrine refers to the right of a buyer of a material object in which a copyrighted work is embodied to resell or transfer the object itself. Ownership of copyright is distinct from ownership of the material object. Section 109 of the Copyright Act permits the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under the Copyright Law to sell or otherwise dispose of possession of that copy or phonorecord without the authority of the copyright owner.
Commonly referred to as the “first sale doctrine,” this provision permits such activities as the sale of used books. The first sale doctrine is subject to limitations that permit a copyright owner to prevent the unauthorized commercial rental of computer programs and sound recordings.” US Government Publication 04-8copyright. http://www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html
Look at the US Government definition above to see one of the reasons why. First sale doctrine only applies to a “material object” like a paper book. A copyrighted digital book isn’t an object, it’s content, and content can’t be copied and, therefore, can’t be resold.
Also, copyrighted digital content like music, computer software, and ebooks aren’t technically sold, they are leased according to the licensing terms a person agrees to when they put their money down for the song, etc.
The difference between “lease” and “buy” is also used as a justification of why an ebook can’t be resold.
All those who say that “first sale doctrine” applies to copyrighted ebooks are wrong from a legal perspective.
Only lawsuits, the courts, or Congress can change this, but most of the money is on the side of the copyright leasers — the publishers, music and movie companies, etc., so I doubt “first sale doctrine” will ever apply to copyrighted ebooks.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up: Why Your Books Are No Longer Yours, Columbia Science and Technology Law Review.
http://www.stlr.org/2008/03/amazon-kindle-and-sony-reader-locked-up-why-your-books-are-no-longer-yours/
Explores the various issues of sale versus license, first sale doctrine, etc.
iTunes White Paper
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/media/uploads/81/iTunesWhitePaper0604.pdf
The last sections explain various governments’ stances on first sale doctrine issues.
US Government Publication 04-8copyright.
http://www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html
Copyright, as well as “first sale” and “fair use,” defined and explained.
A very interesting post about a complex issue and conflicting philosophies Marilynn. Unfortunately, it is not quite as clear cut as you have posted regarding “licensing”.
Take a look here:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/autocad-resale-ruling-a-messy-win-for-first-sale-doctrine.ars
A federal court has ruled several times that digital software is owned, not licensed despite the original EULA. And as such, can be sold given the first sale doctrine. Historically, companies can ask for anything in a EULA and do all the time, but quite often the EULAs mean nothing legally and are routinely discarded by the courts. So an EULA for an e-book may not mean anything significant in the end or it could mean something.
Clearly, this issue needs to be sorted out better.
I don’t think the divide is unbridgeable…
…yet.
But it is getting there.
Fast.
And (sorry) the reason is the BPHs are reacting to the mainstreaming of ebooks as if they were being asked to sacrifice their firstborn children *and* responding to a new market reality with needlessly provocative statements, needlessly provocative actions, as if they were above market forces. Just like the aristocracy before the French Revolution, come to think of it…
Simple wake up call, people: we live in a consumerist society. Like it or not, it is the reality we live. Deal with it.
Yes, people *will* demand a quality product as cheaply as possible. Just ask Ford and Honda about it.
No, people will *not* stay quiet when publishers regularly (weekly?) whine about how $9.99 ebooks are an abomination and a crime against humanity. Not when that “ridiculously low” price is higher than mainstream paperback prices and they *know* that plenty of other authors and publishers seem to be prospering at much lower price points.
Are the oh-so-vocal demands unreasonable?
Maybe. But that is exactly how free and open markets work.
Supply and demand.
In a proper free market there is supposed to be a tension between consumer and supplier; that is how the system works.
Producers vote with their production lines and customers vote with their wallets.
And consumers do not particularly enjoy being told (by inference) that they are uninformed, ignorant, or stupid for expecting that subtracting material and processing costs from a print book should result in a product that costs less than one wrapped in dead tree pulp. The tend to get testy when producers insult their intelligence.
If there is to be a detente, the BPH executives need to stop fanning the flames by telling ebook readers demanding a quality product at a fair price (how dare they!) to “eat cake instead” (metaphorically-speaking).
Guillotine days are still far off; we are not yet looking at a revolution. Yet.
But any real debate must perforce be based on fact, not nebulous proclamations about mysterious (and undocumented) costs that somehow make it so unreasonable for paying customers to expect a quality ebook to be readily available at a fair price. Readers are, by definition, literate folks; if treated as rational adults, they’ll listen to reasonable debate. But they can also tell when they are being snowed.
Transparency matters.
If there are hidden costs driving the BPHs to bankruptcy, hiding those costs will only make things worse. Because, absent a reasonable explanation (as opposed to a dismissive whine), the readers’ expectation is that the BPHs are just padding the accounts to justify their glass towers.
If that explanation becomes common currency, then we *will* be seeing the guillotines rolled out.
We’re not there yet but we’re slowly headed that way.
Nobody wins in a peasant revolt but if the publishing aristocracy stays on the road they’ve embarked on in the last year, the peasants *will* revolt.
The ball is in their court.
It’s really pretty simple. Physical book sales are falling, at best stagnant in some areas, while sales of all forms of internet distributed entertainment (games, music, move and TV show downloads and streaming) are rising all over the world. A whole new generation are coming onstream who get virtually all their information and entertainment from the internet while all the print books lovers are getting older and dying. Unless publishers make the transition to ebooks and related interactive forms of information distribution pretty quickly they’re doomed to irrelevancy and bankruptcy.
Responding to the threat by trying to cram the internet into 19th century business models won’t work, just look at what happened to the 20th century business models of the music industry and what is happening to the movie and TV industry as we speak.
Trying to fight physics by making bits harder to copy as a is a mugs game and doomed to failure. Trying to turn every customer into a potential criminal and scare them into not doing what comes naturally and easily with a networked computer is a fools errand (akin to stopping teens from having sex) and only going to drive away the very people publishers are trying to sell books to. Trying to claim that when you sell someone an electronic book you’re not really “selling” them anything but granting them a license and many pages of legal BS to back it up, while simultaneously limiting the devices they can read it on, will just make them mad and reluctant to buy anything in the first place. Trying to claim that despite needing no paper, no printing presses, no warehouses and no physical distribution (and in reality no middleman retailer either) publishers can’t sell ebooks at a significantly lower price than pbooks will never fly with consumers. Trying to make your product expensive, hard to buy and own, will never help sales.
Yes, Kindle and some other ebooks are selling increasingly well as is with DRM, but that’s because the majority of non-technical customers have not yet realised how locked in they are by Amazon and other DRM schemes. When they’ve bought several hundred dollars worth of Kindle books and a shiny new reader comes along from someone else (the 27th of January approaches, be afraid, be very afraid) they’re going to choke when they find out they can’t (legally) move their ebook library to the new device. The ebook spring may not last much longer, and the winter that follows may be very long and cold indeed.
The 21st century business model and copyright laws have to be based on copying being universal and easy, that people expect to own what they pay for and that the publishers don’t try to force their customers to only use the goods on specified devices and in limited ways.
Publishers are going to have to realise that their customers are not bookshops anymore, but readers. Publishers are going to have to become retailers as well, having a separate retailer in the middle simply makes no sense in a world of electronic distribution. The only organization more threatened by ebooks than the traditional publishers is the bookshop.
Quite possibly none of the current major publishers will survive, except as echoes – brands and trademarks that were sold off, all that were salvaged from a string of corporate collapses and endless downsizings. I don’t give a rat’s about them, but I do care that the coming digital generation care about books; not just the smell of paper, leather bindings and all that stuff, but the knowledge and stories that are the essence of books.
I believe that the potential market for books is a lot larger than most publishers and book industry “experts” assume, they all assume that most people don’t read for pleasure and never will. Many potential book buyers are put off by the whole bookshop atmosphere and their perceptions of literary snobbishness, as well as the high cost of books compared to other entertainment options. Done properly ebooks can help turn this around, they can greatly increase book sales and return the printed word to something like its place in our culture was before movies, TV and computer games pushed it into the ever shrinking egghead ghetto (where it has classical music to keep it company). The question is will anyone take advantage of the new opportunities that the internet and ebooks present or will they all go to their graves clinging desperately to dead business models?
Say what you want about DRM, but I believe if publishers continue down the road of insisting on strict DRM, they’ll end up like the music industry.
As for the ‘leasing digital content, not buying’ argument, I don’t buy it. Leasing implies the seller can take it back. After I purchase an ebook, the ebook file is backed up on my external hard drive. And the file gets moved to my other backups as well. No way a seller is going to take away what I legally purchased.
The problem right now is that the laws are outdated, so there’s too much gray area.
@Felix:
The same thing can be said the other way ’round: The publishers are surely tired of consumers insulting their intelligence, suggesting that they know exactly how the industry works. No wonder they won’t condescend to respond to such consumers…
@Brad: You’re right: The laws are outdated, and that includes the definitions of “buying” and “leasing.” The old labels are not only not serving us anymore, but they are increasingly clouding the issues. The labels and definitions need to be revised and updated, to make clear what is happening at the producer and consumer levels. Until that happens, we will probably not solve these issues.
Of the four major forms of entertainment (music, video, games, and text) evolving into the digital arena, books are the first to get started and the last to be mainstreamed.
You would think that the BPHs would have paid some attention to the other idustries.
So far, gaming has made the cleanest transition despite having some of the most oppressive forms of DRM known to humanity (up to and including lock-down to a single player device).
Music has (so far) had the worst transition by cluelessly staggering like a drunkard through a mindfield from one disaster to another; sticking with an aging inconvenient medium too long, buying into Apple’s pricing and DRM scheme without paying heed to what lock-in does to content providers, and going to war with their customers…
Video has suffered the least, so far. Their major mistep being mismanaging the transition to HD and in the process turning a major portion of their consumer sales into rentals.
Looking at the players, the one thing that jumps out is, yes; transparency.
Consumers know the exact roles of console vendors, game developers, and game publishers and what each off them brings to the table in the form of added value.
In the movie business, likewise, it is well understood what the studio, the producers, the director, editor, writer and everybody down to the last gofer on a producton does. If the studios get routinely creative in their internal bookkeeping they nonetheless use their gross cost and revenue a promotinal tools quite effectively.
The music business rarely discloses their costs and sales numbers and certainly doesn’t do much to publicize the role of the studio. Which considering how often those activities turn out to be of dubious legality, well…
And the big name publishers?
The only time consumers hear about them is when they cry poverty (usually to raise prices) or bemoan the rising printing and transportation costs or how they are being squeezed by the channel. Very little if any talk about the quality of the product and very little talk of the value they add to the end product.
The human brain is hardwired to look for patterns and people find them everywhere, whether they exist or not. Presented with a tabula rasa, they will fill it in as best they know how. Presented with undocumented handwaving and condescending prevarcation, the will assume malice where only incompetence miht exist.
This is simply the reality of modern life.
Consumers will *not* accept the word of any producer at face value. Those days died with the Corvair; blame Ralph Nader if you must but the baseline expectation of consumers is producers are out to rip-em off.
Entire industries live and die by consumer relations, especially at times of technology disruption. Kinda like the ongoing mainstreaming of ebooks. (Just ask DEC and Sun and the hordes of roadkill left behind in the microprocessor revolution.)
So far, the bulk of the visibility in the ebook mainstreaming has gone to the idiot executives of giant publishing houses who are running around in circles rambling about how the sky is falling and very little to the Baens, O’Reillys, Tors, Harlequins and what-not who are quietly and effectively carving out roles for themselves in the new order by, among other things, *engaging* their customerss and potential customers, by focusing on customer needs and expectations, not just their own parochial concerns. (Yes, publishing is hard work with razor thin margins. So are most businesses today. Most companies just suck it in and try harder. Times are tough and whining earns no sympathy. Harsh but true.)
And yes, it does not escape notice that the outfits prospering are all narrow-focus specialty houses. No real shock, really, because specialty houses are used to being under pressure, to operating lean and mean, to singing for their supper.
It may be that the day off the monster horizontal publisher is ending. That the future belongs to tightly-focused vertical publishers. Certainly, consumer electronics is trending that way.
The giant conglomerates of yesterday (Sony, Panasonic, Philps, etc) are falling behind the tightly-focused Apples, Nintendos, and Vizios of the world. Maybe the same fate awaits Harper Collins, Macmillan, Hachete, et al. Either they reorganize or they’ll die. Cause browbeatting or going to war with their customerss won’t work. Just ask the RIAA…
In the current environment, consumers want to know what they are getting for their money. In detail. Whether they are “entitled” to it or not.
They are loud and obnoxious.
But they have the money and money talks.
Everybody is entitled to their opinion and their own approach, but if I were in a business that depends on mass market consumers, I’d do everything I could to engage them and get them on my side.
Cause, like it or not, they have the upper hand.
Sorry!
Publishers have only added barriers to ebooks.
-DRM
-Regional Restrictions (I know historical contracts, but what about the contract they just signed yesterday)
-TTS Restrictions
-High Pricing
-Delayed release
-Poor quality
The book industry is going through a major disruptive technology that forces the examination of the value chain and changes the cut of the pie. I’m glad that they are so confident in the value they’re adding that they can only demonstrate negative value in the new model.
Predicting that the big publishing houses will go out of business is very different then calling for their heads.
Online Reader said, “A very interesting post about a complex issue and conflicting philosophies Marilynn. Unfortunately, it is not quite as clear cut as you have posted regarding “licensing”.
Take a look here:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/autocad-resale-ruling-a-messy-win-for-first-sale-doctrine.ars ”
Actually, the case above refers to software on their original CDs, not digital copies.
According to the “First Sale Doctrine,” it is legal to resell the original physical object that contains the content, i.e. the paper book, the CD, the video tape, etc., but it is not legal to resell the content itself in a digital form or by reprinting it in paper form or copying it onto a CD.
This lawsuit and its results really don’t affect our discussion of the difference between buying and leasing.
David S. Says: “Trying to claim that despite needing no paper, no printing presses, no warehouses and no physical distribution (and in reality no middleman retailer either) publishers can’t sell ebooks at a significantly lower price than pbooks will never fly with consumers. Trying to make your product expensive, hard to buy and own, will never help sales.”
Amazon takes over 60 percent off the top of every Kindle ebook sale. That’s more than the cut the paper distributors and book stores take together.
With predatory practices like this, you can’t lay all the blame on publishers.
David said, “Publishers are going to have to become retailers as well, having a separate retailer in the middle simply makes no sense in a world of electronic distribution. The only organization more threatened by ebooks than the traditional publishers is the bookshop.”
I’ve been involved in ebook publishing for almost a dozen years as an author with some of the best indie epublishers. Many of us, during the early days, saw ebooks as a way to circle around the big distributors and chain book stores to reach the reader.
Every indie epubisher had its own website storefront. Then Fictionwise and a few other distributors opened their cyberdoors, and the first e-reader, the Rocketbook, came out and had its own store.
The books were more expensive at these sites than at the publishers’ sites, but the buyers went to the distributors because they wanted one stop shopping. For every book most of us sold at our publishers, hundreds of books were sold at the distributors.
Meanwhile, the distributors noticed that the publishers were underselling them and told them to raise their website prices or leave. Since most of the books sold were through the distributors, the publishers raised their prices.
So much for the freedom most of us sought from the middlemen.
Brad Vertrees Says:
“As for the ‘leasing digital content, not buying’ argument, I don’t buy it. Leasing implies the seller can take it back. After I purchase an ebook, the ebook file is backed up on my external hard drive. And the file gets moved to my other backups as well. No way a seller is going to take away what I legally purchased.”
Publishers have no desire to take away your books, authors have no desire to take away your books, and when Amazon tried that trick, they created such a furor they promised never to do it again.
All this terminology is primarily a way to explain the difference between a physical object and digital content so that readers know they can’t resell the digital content in any form, nor do they have the right to give it away by posting it on the Internet.
A vast majority of us in publishing simply want to do what we love and make some sort of profit doing it. Is that evil?
Treat us fairly, and we will continue to do what we do to give you pleasure. Trash all hope of profit or respect for our work, and we will tearfully put down our cyber pens and get a job at McDonalds where we will be paid better and get more respect.
Ultimately we can argue all we want about the legal specifics, it really doesn’t matter (as it didn’t matter in the music industry either), its what consumers are willing to tolerate.
Legally, there may be a distinction between a e-copy of a book and a paper copy, but try telling that to someone who spent $10 on the electronic copy.
Further, regarding the cost issue. If the publishers are going to argue costs, they better come up with a better argument than Amazon made us do it. So, Amazon has managed to negotiate agreements with publishers that allow Amazon to take 60% off the top of ebooks… whose fault is that? Consumers rightly do not want to be penalized by the bad agreements that publishers make.
“So, Amazon has managed to negotiate agreements with publishers that allow Amazon to take 60% off the top of ebooks… whose fault is that? Consumers rightly do not want to be penalized by the bad agreements that publishers make.”
Yet at the same time publishers are often raked over the coals for not having their books available on the Kindle, or even just delaying a Kindle version. I’m not saying you share those feelings, Bill, but there are plenty of people on this site who do.
Something that I think is clear in many of these discussions is the contradictory nature of much of the rhetoric regarding the demands of the “eBook community”. I think the “eBook community” is only a uniform group in that they enjoy reading digital text but they have a multitude of demands that are clearly fragmented, and are sometimes in direct conflict with each other. I enjoy good discussion, but almost all of the vitriolic rhetoric makes people look like they don’t know enough about what they are talking about and do nothing to push publishing forward.
Actually, ManBehindCurtain, I think most of the big publishers deserve every bit of the flack they are getting from the public. Here is a little secret regarding the Kindle. Content does not have to come from Amazon’s book stores. The only reason you have to sell your content through Amazon is because of… (Dramatic pause for all those who haven’t figured it out yet)… DRM. DRM not only ties the consumers to the devices that they read their books on, but it also ties the publishers to the distributors. By allowing, indeed insisting on DRM, publishers have basically given Amazon a tool that will allow it to squeeze as much money out of the publishers as it wants.
Eliminate DRM from the equation, and kindle’s format is just plain mobi. At that point virtually any online book store can sell the book. Allowing true competition, in this case, would be good not just for the consumers but also for the producers. Granted, it will not be quite as easy for buyers to buy from other sites for the Kindle.. but the right books at the right price would certainly give them incentives.
@Bill McHale: Just one thing to note — Amazon owns the mobi format and is (apparently) letting it die on the vine.
My stance on DRM is actually closely aligned with yours, but the issue is definitely not as black and white as many here believe. I agree that in the long run, discrete eBook file downloads will likely not have DRM. However, we’re still in the infancy of the digital market (even for music, so iTunes still proves nothing, IMO) and it’s not yet clear if that market in the future creates “enough” money to be made on selling discrete file downloads without DRM. Just because Baen and O’Reilly have “figured it out” (and do you actually know if and how profitable they are? I heard that even O’Reilly laid off a bunch of people within the last year), doesn’t necessarily mean that model will be the one that wins out. If this model is not profitable “enough”, the content will either not be created or not be sold as individual files. Maybe we’ll only be able to access certain types of content from a cloud on some sort of subscription basis (the most expensive and my least favorite kind of DRM, even though it accurately describes an awesome platform like Safari Books Online). Yes, the market will speak, but it may not speak in a language all of us want to hear.
Publishing companies in general are in trouble because of the decline in reading across the board, with big, horizontal publishing houses being the most vulnerable. However, I think this has much more to do with their inherent inability to connect directly with readers and prove their brand means something, not DRM or pricing.
Next, I think the most important sentence of your comment is the last one: “Granted, it will not be quite as easy for buyers to buy from other sites for the Kindle.. but the right books at the right price would certainly give them incentives.”
As Marilynn Byerly comments above, your suggestion, although a good one and seemingly obvious, does not maximize profits for publishers and authors, even Independent ones. Perhaps the market has changed since then, and my guess is that it has for certain vertically-oriented publishers, but I’d bet that for the most part the world still acts quite similarly to her description.
No matter how much people whine, the fact is… customers will buy and pay for what they want to buy and pay for. You either supply it or get out.
Also I totally agree with Marilynn and what she’s saying with regards to legal matters. People like to just not think things through. If I sell you an ebook and you can resell it, since it can be endlessly duplicated, you can resell it indefinitely, which would be a direct violation of my copyright. What would my copyright be worth otherwise? And why should I be your writing slave so you can profit off of my work? That’s BS. That law will never change because to change it would be completely asinine for all involved.
Someone could say: “Well we’d only sell one copy.” Sorry but how would anyone actually track that? Illegal file sharing is bad enough.. you want to resell it and you’re just on acid.
If you live outside the USA it gets even more ridiculous I often get all the way to the checkout and choosing delivery address to be declined due to my location.
Its ironic that its easier to get an illegal copy of a ebook than to legally purchase one. I don’t want DRM telling me what I can and cant do I just want to be able to read the ebook in peace. I often just go and buy the paper back instead.