Archive for the ‘used ebook marketplace’ tag
New Service to Buy and Sell Previously Owned eBooks no comments
Lexink announced today their Unloder service that allows readers to sell their used ebooks for store credit which can be used to buy other used ebooks. The service will also work with other digital media such as MP3s and movies.
Lexink is promoting its service as a means of fighting pirating and says that publishers will get a cut of sales. From the press release:
UNLODER™ provides a place for buying and selling ebooks online in addition to providing a resale solution for every type of digital media. Music, television shows, movies and ebooks can be sold and purchased for less. UNLODER™ thus helps to stem the epidemic of digital piracy by making legal file resale a viable alternative to illegal file sharing.
“Since unloaded titles are resold for about a third of the original cost, UNLODER™ makes digital products affordable for people who want to buy licensed media but who are very price sensitive. In addition, digital rights are respected so publishers and creators get their dues with UNLODER™,” says Despallieres (Owner of Lexink).
UNLODER™ provides two revenue streams:
- The Works – UNLODER™ lets the consumer trade in unwanted multimedia titles and is integrated into the Media Player digital download store. Once a title is unloaded and someone purchases it, the media vanishes from the seller’s library and can no longer be played. The seller gets store credit redeemable for other unloaded content or brand new titles.
- The Perks – UNLODER™ creates a new revenue stream for the download store; record companies, studios and artists; publishing houses, bookstores and authors. Currently, the profit line ends once a customer purchases and downloads a product. The UNLODER™ adds a profit opportunity via resale. The more media traded, the more money made. After the initial full price sale of a new title, that same title can generate income over and over as it is unloaded.
This might be interesting if it works, but it sounds like it will be very complicated to implement. If I buy an ebook from the Kindle Store, for example, when I sell it to Lexink it would have to be removed from my library in the cloud. A system like this might help publishers to feel better about ebooks – when a pbook is resold in a used book store they get nothing.
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Could Amazon Create a Marketplace for Used eBooks? 1 comment
A few days ago at Slashgear, Chris Davies wrote an interesting article in which he ponders the possibility of Amazon creating a marketplace where readers could sell their used ebooks, with both Amazon and publishers taking a cut from such sales.
For readers, this would be an attractive idea. Some are hesitant to switch from pbooks to ebooks as when you purchase a digital book you do not get an actual physical copy which you can then freely loan out or sell as used when you are finished with it like you do with paper books.
When you buy an ebook with DRM you are basically purchasing a license to read it. When you are finished, you can of course keep the file on your ereader or other device, or your computer, or hopefully it will remain in your cloud library should you wish to download and read it again in the future. But how many of the books that you read will you actually want to read again, especially if the book in question is a novel? Most readers would probably be more than happy to trade in or sell titles that they have read already.
For publishers, many of whom are already nervous about ebooks, this concept would be sure to raise serious and probably legitimate questions about such reselling of used ebooks cannibalizing sales of new editions. For one thing, if you purchase a used pbook, you expect it to show some wear and tear. A “used” ebook on the other hand would be virtually indistinguishable from a new ebook. So why would anyone choose to buy a new ebook rather than a previously owned one?
Perhaps such a marketplace could be restricted to older titles. Also, if publishers were to receive a portion of used ebook sales that would at least be more than they receive from the sale of used paper books.
At any rate, it is an interesting concept, though not one that I would expect to see the light of day any time soon.
