Thursday, March 17, 2005

If used cars make new cars more valuable, what about used books?


I got set up too late to take exhaustive notes on Chris Anderson's excellent ETECH presentation on
The Long Tail, but this bit actually made me gasp "Wow," relating as it does to so many arguments I've had with sf writers who are really upset about Amazon selling used books alongside of their new books.
On Amazon, a used book and a new book are the same number of clicks away. The market for used cars means you can charge more for new cars, because of the resale value. Is this true of books? It's true of text-books in that you'll pay more for a textbook because you know you can sell it back at the end of the term. Will it be true of all books?
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posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:22:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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