If I buy a book on the Kindle, can I lend it to a friend? My understanding is that I cannot. (Well, I could lend my whole Kindle, but not just the book.)
If I were an author, I’m not sure I would like this because it eliminates the viral nature of books. As an author, or any content creator, there is a lot of value in virality. To simply have your name “out there” as a meme in the a community, hive or culture has a lot of value–as part of the conversation at a cocktail party, so to speak.
Think of this case: have you ever been lent a book that you enjoyed reading, then suggested to someone else that they read the book? I have. In other words, I became an evangelist for the author. I think this is worth as much, if not more, than few dollars they would have earned from the book.
Or, what about books checked out from the library?
And, second-hand bookstores. In a pure sense, the author not the seller, should be earning the dollars when a book is resold. However, Mr. Market factors that loss into the original price of the book. In other words, pricing has reached an equilibrium taking into account the viral benefits of the secondary market.
There are lots of technical ways Kindle could solve this problem, but let me suggest just one. It’s not the best solution, but it’s easy: for each Kindle book that I buy and download I get to “share it” with exactly one other person.
From an implementation point of view, the act of “sharing” is simply by giving a unique promo code to a friend. The code can be used only once and only for a specific book. Online promo codes are well established, so this shouldn’t be hard. And, there are many easy ways that they could be shared from device-to-device, by e-mail, etc.
Anyhow, all I’m saying is that there’s a lot of value to viralty. This about it this way: in a perfect world, content creators would get paid each time their work is used. However, just because they’re not getting paid cash doesn’t mean they’re not getting value from their work.
Have you ever read any of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels? The third in the series, “The Well of Lost Plots,” captures these troubling issues rather well although it was published a few years before the Kindle was released. Incidentally this is also a series I’ve recommended and loaned out to a number of friends.