> Kindle books are DRM'ed, I couldn't sell them once I'm done with them
You couldn't really sell them either if they weren't DRM'd: who'd buy a C-c C-v for a used "digital book"?
DRM could actually enable resale (or some sort of renting), if the DRM schemes supported it: buying a DRM'd book for $15 gives you a license to its content, reselling to the publisher revokes your license and lets you get some money back, and you can transfer the license to an other owner for a subset of the original price (with the publisher taking a cut of the trade for incentive).
Let's say a textbook is $15, you could resell it to the publisher for $7, or "trade" it for say $9 (with the publisher taking $1 or $2 on top).
Now here comes the rub: what's in it for for-profit publishers, especially publicly owned ones? Nothing, instead of selling two licenses they've now sold half a license, or a license and a fraction of one. Why would they bother unless they're forced to?
I'd rather have better-priced ebooks to start with.
> which keeps me buying physical books
Only works if 1. you want to resell them (I've yet to re-sell one of my books, couldn't care less about resale value) and 2. you lose less by reselling it than the price of the ebook (pretty likely considering you can often get the bloody physical book for less than the ebook in the first place).
You couldn't really sell them either if they weren't DRM'd: who'd buy a C-c C-v for a used "digital book"?
DRM could actually enable resale (or some sort of renting), if the DRM schemes supported it: buying a DRM'd book for $15 gives you a license to its content, reselling to the publisher revokes your license and lets you get some money back, and you can transfer the license to an other owner for a subset of the original price (with the publisher taking a cut of the trade for incentive).
Let's say a textbook is $15, you could resell it to the publisher for $7, or "trade" it for say $9 (with the publisher taking $1 or $2 on top).
Now here comes the rub: what's in it for for-profit publishers, especially publicly owned ones? Nothing, instead of selling two licenses they've now sold half a license, or a license and a fraction of one. Why would they bother unless they're forced to?
I'd rather have better-priced ebooks to start with.
> which keeps me buying physical books
Only works if 1. you want to resell them (I've yet to re-sell one of my books, couldn't care less about resale value) and 2. you lose less by reselling it than the price of the ebook (pretty likely considering you can often get the bloody physical book for less than the ebook in the first place).