Monday, April 15, 2002

Used books Bezos has an open letter defending peoples right to buy and sell used books. Selling a book after buying it lowers its real cost to the buyer. The correct response for publishers, if this effect becomes large, is to raise the price of new books. Publishers will capture their old royalty up front, and sell fewer books. The aftermarket price of books will rise as the quantity of books available (through first sale) goes down. So, publishers need to capture more of the value upfront, as efficient aftermarkets gut post-sale monopoly markups

The extreme case is the future of music: recordings from live shows freely distributed online.

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