After making a cozy profit on the sale of my used iPad, I decided to take the plunge and buy the new Kindle. It hasn’t arrived yet but I’m incredibly excited about having a device that will make for an immersive reading experience. Thinking about life as a future Kindle-lover, I also put a lot of thought into why I hadn’t yet joined millions of others in the world of electronic reading. Put differently, what will it take for us to abandon physical books and do all our reading through a Kindle-like device?
There’s good precedence for this question: music. People really began to embrace mp3 players and listening to music on computers when it became possible to take all of the music they already owned and convert it to mp3 format. People warmed to a new device because it embraced the individual media they owned on their old devices while also allowing them to more easily add to their collection. The key was they almost never had to pay twice for music they already owned. This, in addition to a easy process for buying music, is what really allowed mp3 players to become the de-facto choice for music.
To become truly dominant, an ebook reader has to do what the mp3 player did. As the iPod embraced the CDs you already owned, the Kindle has to figure out a way for you to carry digital copies of the books you already own.
But rights holders (read: publishers) probably don’t want you to be able to have electronic copies of your physical books. They want you to pay once for a physical copy and again for an electronic copy. They want to protect themselves against you selling the physical copy if you got the electronic copy for free. They also want eBooks to operate as “new books” only, with no competition from used books. The publishers (and device makers that double as new book e-tailers) make no money from a used book.
In making the calculation that you shouldn’t be allowed electronic copies of books you already own, publishers slow down the adoption rate of ebooks. (And let’s not forget that an e-book market with many competing devicemakers/e-tailers is good for publishers. $9.99 for an e-book means more profit for publishers than $9.99 for a paperback. Of course its good for e-tailers too because they don’t have to cover the costs of warehousing, etc, etc.)
But there is a way out of this conundrum. Device makers should offer a deal to publishers where they collect and recycle used books in exchange for the device maker granting the owner of the used book a digital copy of the used book. Publishers could even get a $2 or $3 per book, paid by the consumer as a “conversion fee.”
As more and more people “trade-in” their used books for new books, the supply of used books will go down dramatically. This will cause the prices of used books to go up and they will ultimately get very close to the price of new books. This will eliminate the price advantage of buying used books. At this point, more and more people will either buy new physical books or buy new e-books, bringing more revenues to publishers and e-tailers and taking away the competition provided by the used book market.
In the long run, the decision to digitize used books could prove to be an enormous revenue boon for publishers, device makers, and e-tailers. It’s a decision that would speed adoption of an arguably higher profit sales model (e-books) while also providing incredible convenience to consumers. I know that I would like it…
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