The NYT has a story on Online Battle of Low-Cost Books. The allegation is that selling used books online is similar to file sharing on the internet--a la napster, et al. That analogy can be discarded fairly quickly because the books being sold have substance (ousia) while the files shared are just the bits of the content, the form. When you buy a book, you buy the physical book, and not merely the words. That's the way the marketplace works. If someone buys a book and they decide it's not a keeper, then they sell it on to someone else who's curious.

This morning I sold a comic book via Amazon, Miracleman Boook 1, for ~$60. Why would someone pay that much for a comic book? Even one by Alan Moore? Because of supply and demand; the book is not available from the publisher any longer. I expect the publisher is probably not available any longer. I've read it and don't care to read it again. The book is in demand and there's no supply. On the other hand if someone doesn't want another book cluttering up the house any longer, and the publisher flooded the market with copies, the price goes down. This is also true of other media. Leaving aside file-sharing, there is a legal market for music albums and movies on video tape and DVD. My dad, turntable-less these days, gave me his copy of Sergio Mendes Trio's first LP. It's worth over $100--and it's a keeper; no emailed offers please. If the mega-corporation that controls the music wanted to re-release the LP, they would lower its value to something reasonable. It's their decision not to. For some reason they don't like to release LPs that wear out after they are played a certain number of times and instead prefer to release digital copies that consumers can make perfect copies of and thus will never wear out. It has also been publishers' decisions to flood the market with remaindered copies of books and music that they can't sell, instead of pulping them. I'm not in favor of pulping media, but it is the publishers' decision what to sell at what price, and what not to, and then the market decides what something is actually worth.

A few years ago I decided to sell my fluid mechanics books that had sat gathering dust for a couple of decades. I discovered that some were worthless and others were worth hundreds of dollars. Why were some so pricey? Publishers had decided to stop publishing them, and had instead published newer books. And consumers of fluid mechanics books had found the newer books to be not as good and they were ready to pay a premium for the better, out of print, books. Publishers made mistakes, their choices were unpopular, and the prices on the newer books had dropped below the retail price because consumers preferred the older books publishers had decided to drop. This market is merely a mirror that reflects back the decisions made by publishers.

What is really going on is that the market is becoming bi-directional. Instead of publishers pushing product in from one side and customers passively consuming at the other end, today customers are pushing the products they don't want back into the market. Perhaps some bidirectionality is needed at the other end to; publishers should read their products more critically and ask themselves if it is really worth publishing much of the dross they push into the bookstores. If you look on Amazon you'll find books that sell for less than the cost of shipping, and probably less than the price of the paper, ink, and manufacturing. There is not too much supply because of pirated copies, but because publishers have flooded the market with more supply than demand can sustain at the prices publishers desire. Some publishers will get it right and prosper, and other publishers will be failures and, if I understand the grousing in the NYT article correctly, demand that politicians protect them from their ineptitude.  ¶ 9:18 AM