I had a library with thousands (and thousands) of books. When I moved I decided to get rid of many of them, because decluttering. Long story short - by the time you've allowed for post/carriage, listing time, packaging, and so on, you're more likely to be left with 5-10% of the nominal cover price - and that only after endless hours of work.
I donated most of mine, and I still got complaints from the local recycling facility that they were worthless because they were "too obscure" (i.e. pop science, math, stats, and such.)
Pulling up a few random books for example https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640/...
I see I can buy it new for about $11 although I wouldn't be surprised to pay $15 in a physical store. Selling it could get me about 10 but I would have to pay about a buck to amazon and around 3 to ship it for a net of 6.
This is 40% - 55% of original value.
Perhaps more importantly lending or giving them in person arguably gives them the same $10 worth of value. Shipping it to someone produces $10 worth of value for 3.
A book that is shared 3 times has produced $30 worth of value. A book that is shared 10 times has produced $100 worth.
An ebook that you might not be able to read in 10 years is SUBSTANTIALLY less valuable than the physical book.
Adding this value proposition back in and removing DRM that strip actual ownership both laudable goals in themselves are entirely at odds. Artificial scarcity is broken by design and unfixable.
I can't expect anyone to want an old manual for LISP programming so now I'm holding onto my old books because it's not worth dragging them to the used bookstore. And, every so often, I will go back and look at them. There was a discussion on HN involving assembly language and machine architecture, it caused me to pull out my old book on CDC 6600 assembler.
In another 10 years I'll forget this and try to sell my used books again.
I get what I want while supporting a local bookstore and the author.
But that of course is very subjective.
As an example, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: Primary Phase. The CD version is £20 from Amazon, whereas on Amazon Audible it's at most £8. (I'm not counting the £18 listed price on Audible, as one can simply 'subscribe' for £8, buy the audiobook with the token, then immediately unsubscribe. I put 'at most' because their per-book price is lower with a high-volume subscription.)
In this case, I'm ok with the DRM'ed non-physical version, as it's so much cheaper. It's true I can't easily gift the audiobooks or leave them in my will. It's also true that Amazon has the power to lock me out of my library, and if Audible disappears, I probably lose my library.
The product you're buying is really: rental of unknown duration. And unless that's really substantially cheaper than actually buying it on disc, it's a terrible deal.
It's a pretty good deal when I don't have a disc player of any kind (well, CD).
It's a terrible deal if you want to own the e-book for a second read, because you haven't bought that.
It displayed everywhere nicely. I never purchased books from other locations so I got no opinion on FNAC and the likes, but I never had an issue on Amazon books.
I do not believe that is universally true.
(FWIW... I found a lot of SciFi authors request no DRM, as it supports their personal beliefs and values, but that's a personal observation rather than objective survey of the field)
1: https://www.amazon.com/John-Scalzi-ebook/dp/B000SEIK2S If you unroll/expand description you'll see the quote
But it'd be real nice to be able to purchase DRM free ebooks, a la GOG for games.
I think it's worth calling out publishers that aren't hostile to readers. Are there others?
[1]: https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/torforge-e-books-are-now-drm-...
Typically, my process is:
- If the ebook is available DRM-free, buy that (this is easiest for scifi, <3 Tor/Baen)
- Else, if I can find a reasonably-priced physical copy, buy that (especially from an indie bookseller)
- Else, pirate the ebook
Ebooks don't work this way. I borrow them from a library. You're right, once an ebook is read it's just bits. They don't have the same value as hard copy books for resale, gifting, donation, or leaving out on the coffee table. Even obsolete textbooks have value, my monitor sits a few inches higher on top of a couple. Can't do that with ebooks.
When I go to buy a book, the ebook price seems to be 10-25% lower than hardcover. It could just be my experience, but this has been the case for dozens of books. I look at this difference as the lack-of-salability discount.
I won't buy print books anymore, because they are too cumbersome vs digital. The 20% discount vs print, or 30% increase over net value of print, by your calculation, is worth the value I receive.
I exaggerate, because there are some print books I buy, specifically for the print format, because for those books so much of the value is in the packaging and physical form factor. The Apple hardware book, the Nasa Graphics Standards book, the recent Prince of Persia book, etc. For a couple, I buy both print and ebook because both formats have their own value; for the same book sometimes it's good to be able to page flip and sometimes it's good to be able to search. Brendan Gregg's BPF book is a recent one that comes to mind.
But for the most part (95%+), I buy only digital, and I am happy to pay "more" than the net print value.
I'm a bit morbid, given that I statistically have decades of reading ahead of me, but I always dreamed of transferring the collection to my bookworm niece. I only learned of this Amazon policy recently and it was crushing!
I think within 5-10 years digital media like ebooks, games, movies etc will transition to being represented by ERC-721 tokens which brings with it the benefits of physical media (permanent ownership, sharability, etc) while also being easy to store, transport, read digital items. The main benefit is that you can buy your ebook/game/movie in one store/ecosystem and even if that system goes out of business your purchase will still be valid at other stores and platforms. Like physical books, these items can be re-sold and given to anyone you like (granted you won't have access to the book anymore.)
2. I remember a substantial issue with Etherium wherein someone was able to steal a large amount of currency from other users in 2016. What are the risks of an attacker say stealing a large number of tokens intended to be sold to users from distributor or even the ability to create them? In a decentralized world how do you invalidate them? If you can invalidate them doesn't that mean any seller can take back anything?
This can happen now of course they can steal a copy of your pre production movie but potential to monetize is garbage and effect on your legitimate value proposition may be largely unchanged. In this brave new world their stolen tokens may actually have a legitimate market. Steal 1 million tokens sell all 5 days after release as already read for 10% less than going rate before owner bans tokens from legitimate market.
3. What about the case in which someone breaks into your computer or infects it with malware and effectively loots all your books and music and sells it on craigslist/amazon/facebook. How do you invalidate those purchases without a secondary authority. If you can haven't you recreated central distribution with more steps?
2. True, there is always smart contract risk. The DAO hack happened right after Ethereum was founded as nobody really knew what they were doing and tooling was extremely basic. Things are still in the early dial up days for crypto but even now tooling is vastly better, there are dedicated firms for contract/code auditing and the systems being created today are much more robustly designed. With that said, nothing can be certified 100% safe and the only concrete proof of security we have is the passing of time itself. These systems will be new for a while and adoption of this tech will happen slowly over time in the same way the internet grew over two decades into what we know today. There will likely be a system that withstands the test of time and becomes old enough to be trusted by even conservative developers, but until then there will likely be mechanisms built-in where the content creator can destroy and re-create tokens in case of failure. Not every token will be this way and the decision is up to the content creator themselves.
3. This is a problem for wallets in general and lots of people are working on it. The leading solution seems to be social recovery which is where you designate trusted addresses (family members, hardware wallets, friends etc) and configure it to allow your wallet to be recovered if say 3 of the 5 agree that you legitimately lost it. If you ever lose your wallet because you forgot the password or your computer/phone died then you can recover it easily and safely, no complicated and technically hard key backup systems needed which is key for normal non-HN people. You can also set outgoing filters so your ERC-721 tokens couldn't be sent unless it's to a whitelisted address or you verify it with another of your trusted addresses, so even if a hacker got into your wallet they couldn't transfer the tokens and you would just recover your wallet using the system above. It's still early days but Argent is the best example of this.
If everyone suddenly had at least hundreds of dollars of value on their desktop that could be stolen and easily monetized by any software also running on said computer then the entire planet becomes a target rich environment full of badly secured computers. Buy or break into an addon used by 10k people. Steal an average of $200 in digital goods per user and walk away with 2 million dollars.
With most tokens, no. They are yours forever. If the token creator did want to set this up then they can do it though. An example is RealT which tokenizes rental housing. They can revoke a token and re-issue it if they need to (if you lose your token or it gets stolen) and they are up front about this. It is very obvious when a token has a backdoor and most of them do not as it's kind of a scandal when someone does backdoor a token and people don't adopt it.
>Regarding social recovery
I did cover theft in my comment but I'll elaborate. Smart contract wallets are more sophisticated than simply money being stored on a computer. They operate a lot like banks do today with daily spending limits, trusted owners, and the like. With Argent for example you can limit outgoing transfers to non-whitelisted addresses to $100 a day similar to how ATMs are limited in the amount you can withdraw daily. This cuts down on loss due to theft. As soon as you notice $100 missing you would recover your wallet (like replacing your debit card) and the thief wouldn't be able to steal anymore. Also, in case you don't know the technicals, wallets are generally very secure and even if an extension can see your wallet they won't be able to access the funds as they are cryptographically protected and also secured by a password/biometrics. So it's not likely that your funds will be stolen by a run-of-the-mill thief and even if they are successful the loss is limited.
With all that said, a lot of people will likely still use banks to store and use their crypto as those existing trusted intermediaries still work just fine. People just have the option of storing their digital money themselves now.
Presumably those spending limits and indeed ANY limits are user configurable with a token that could itself be stolen or just used by software instead of a person on the machine in question. If the person can do it the software can after all. For example by faking keyboard and mouse input and keystroke logging the user to steal their password.
We can't secure simple things now I cannot imagine how you can believe we can secure complex things with even higher stakes.
Credit card transactions are tolerable because the financial sector takes in a huge chunk of the value of the economy and writes off losses out of that huge pile of money.
In a decentralized situation where the only money in the kitty is users actual money how does this actually work?
This goes down the rabbit hole of crypto a bit and I don't want to drone on too much if it gets annoying, sorry in advance.
Most tokens will not be centrally controlled in the future (I can elaborate if you're interested). During the transition period there will be centralized tokens like RealT which have similar properties to the paper forms we use today but even in that state they do offer improvements such as integration with DeFi products (RealT tokens can traded on Uniswap and will likely be integrated into Maker allowing for using your property shares in a collatorized loan), easier accountability/auditability, and other use cases (Let's go a bit sci-fi and say your car lock will open for you as long as you prove you own the car's ERC-721).
>Presumably those spending limits and indeed ANY limits are user configurable with a token that could itself be stolen or just used by software instead of a person on the machine in question.
This stuff does exist and there's some really good documentation out there that's not just me rambling :) Changing or turning off the spending limits or whitelists comes with a user-defined waiting period, so even if a virus somehow accomplishes this feat you would still be notified and have a day or so to cancel the changes and recover your wallet. Your original example was a browser extension which cannot fake keyboard or mouse input to your wallet. It would need to be a real virus of some kind which is rare on desktops in today's world and basically impossible on mobile platforms. I'm not saying the risk is 0% but it's not like mass numbers of people are going to just get their crypto stolen willy nilly, especially if they use their phones like the majority of the people in the world do.
>Credit card transactions are tolerable because the financial sector takes in a huge chunk of the value of the economy and writes off losses out of that huge pile of money.
Credit cards will still exist in a crypto world. Banks will still exist too. You will be able to reverse those payments just like you can today even if the credit card company backs their operations with ETH/DAI/BTC instead of USD. On top of that, it's actually really easy to develop a payment system on top of Ethereum that contains the ability to reverse transactions for a period of time with complex logic such as different amounts of time for different merchants based on a calculated risk score. For end users this isn't much different at all in the short to medium term.
Malware isn't impossible on mobile. Android install security is in a fashion crap and androids are 90% of the market worldwide.
OEMs base their installs on old kernel versions that support their custom never to be upstreamed modules needed to boot their board then after 0 through a few updates stop providing updates for their phones. This is so because their is no stable interface for kernel modules.
My own phone is running 3.18 while my laptop is running 5.6.
Ultimately a lot of people are running around with devices that are actually vulnerable to things we already know are broken in addition to the known vulnerabilities upcoming that will be known to attackers long before its known to OEMS.
You can posit a better more secure future but the honest truth is that our present work is crap and we have no particular reason to believe the future isn't also largely composed of crap. It's trivial to imagine that in a situation where you can derive an increasing payout for breaking security that the attackers wont keep pace with those trying to secure the future.
This pessimism has been the correct answer from the moment computers were networked to one another through today. Given that we have been bad at securing networked computers for 5 decades it behooves the optimistic to prove it.
Maybe in 5 years we will all be running devices running Sel4 with only substantially audited code but I would bet on more steaming piles of insecurity instead.
Thanks for the interesting discussion though.
The price of an ebook has so far been the same as the price of a physical book. Considering the resale value of a book is on average about 50% of the original price, the real price of an ebook for the user with this limitation should be ~50% less than the cost of the paper book. (Not taking into account shipping costs, etc...)
This became real to me when my aunt died. She had purchased thousands of dollars worth of ebooks. Had she purchased physical books, those books would have been donated or resold. At a loss to the publisher, but a gain to the original purchaser and secondary purchaser. (or estate in this case).
Unless I as the purchaser am at least partially compensated for this loss of value by a price decrease, I cannot buy ebooks with a resale limitation.