alt Hacker NewsI've made the switch to ebooks.i haven't yet had a problem with pricing like you suggest, but I have been a little worried about my library of purchased books might one day disappear since they all use DRM, and I don't really own any of my books in any real sense of the word.
Then again, even that doesn't worry me too much, since I almost never read a book twice anyway. I think the only book I've read more than once is the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
For now, in my experience, ebooks have always been cheaper than print versions of the same work. I suspect that if one calculated the resell value of a printed book, the prices would come out about equal. Which is why I chose eBooks for their convenience.
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This is why you download the liberated versions from Anna after supporting the author.
If you don't read a book multiple times, why not borrow from a public library (if such a thing exist in the country you live in)? Here in Sweden they are free, and you can even get them to loan a book from another library if they don't have it locally (though for physical books it will of course take a few days to get it delivered). Remote loans used to cist around 20 SEK (about 2 EUR), but is now also free since earlier this year.
There are some books I absolutely buy (and I have a rather large library myself, entirely physical), but there are many cases where borrowing makes more sense.
The resale value of books isn’t that great for most individuals since you have to do at minimum the work of listing it on eBay, and maybe even listing it on Amazon who has much more hoops to jump through, and then pay for shipping and platform fees. But the value to publishers of killing off the used book market by not printing the paper book in the first place is the reason ebooks are so popular with them. Did you know that when libraries buy ebooks, the license automatically evaporates after a set number of loans? Like 10 or 20 IIRC.
Anna's Archive can help you out with that. Illegal downloading is your greatest entertainment value.
I'd argue that we never really "owned" books. Put aside the mundane physical object and assume that a book is a work of culture, authored by somebody else. What can "own" possibly mean in this context? You don't somehow commandeer its copyright by gaining an indefinite right to consult it. The words "own" and "buy" and "sell" are fundamentally ill-suited to abstract quantities such as knowledge and information and ideas. Perhaps our attachment to this (IMO) egregious category error of "ownership" can be explained by centuries of capitalism and (more recently) consumerism.
The only reason I ever read HHGTTG as a kid is because it was on a bookshelf at home and I eventually got bored enough to pick it up. I don’t currently have an ebook equivalent of that for my kids