IP: more on Amazon used book sales & the intellectualcommons

[David Farber <dfarber@earthlink.net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Cory Doctorow <doctorow@craphound.com>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 14:45:26 
To: <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: IP: Tim O'Reilly on Amazon used book sales & the intellectual
	commons

Dave, I've written and blogged a similar letter to the Authors Guild,
wearing my professional-science-fiction-writer hat:

http://www.well.com/~doctorow/agletter.txt

Dear Mr. Aiken,

I'm writing today to voice my support for Amazon's innovative
used-book program. I'm a professional science fiction writer and
journalist, the recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New
Science Fiction Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards, and the author of
two novels forthcoming from Tor Books and a short-story
collection forthcoming from Four Walls Eight Windows. I also
spent my adolescence working in book stores and libraries.

I'm quite distressed at the Authors Guild's reactionary position
on Amazon's used-book service. As a new author whose books will
be published as $25+ hardcovers, my principal challenge will be
to find a way to introduce my work to new readers. The
intershelving of used and new books has been shown to be an
effective means of driving sales of new authors -- I discovered
this myself when I was a bookseller, and it's an experience that
has been replicated in many bookstores, from corner operations
like my local genre bookstore, Borderlands Books, all the way up
to Powell's Books, the largest bookstore in the world.

What's more, the Amazon used-books service does not push the
bounds of established copyright law or practice *at all*. The
right of a consumer to resell the property s/he's lawfully
acquired (called the Doctrine of First Sale) is the reason that
we are able to have used bookstores at all. Also, yard-sales,
charitable donations, library discard sales, collectibles sales,
etc and so forth.

Indeed, one of the most revolting characteristics of many e-book
technologies is that they abridge this right -- think of all the
tens of millions of books donated to schools and libraries, sent
to prisons and literacy programs, passed from friend to friend or
within a family. The Doctrine of First Sale makes all of this
possible.

Amazon's used-book service only reduces the friction involved in
a used-book sale. When I worked at Bakka, a science fiction
bookstore with new and used stock, young sf fans with tight
budgets would often request popular titles that were available
new on the shelf as used copies on their wish-lists. These are
precisely the readers whose disappearance that we science fiction
writers lament at every sf con as we look around at our greying
ranks and wonder whether the genre is disappearing. Amazon's
service makes this kind of thing easier and better for those
readers -- why would we, as authors, wish to stop Amazon from
extending the service?

Arguably, this is what the Internet is *for* -- connecting people
at low cost, finding new market niches and exploiting them,
reducing friction.

Copyright is a bargain between the public domain and creators --
we are able to create well and profit by our creations because we
are able to benefit from the commons created by the works of
those who came before us, which have entered the public domain.
The bargain allows us to be effective creators, and it allows
others to be innovative consumers.

Here Amazon and its customers (who are providing every one of
those used books!) are building an innovative secondary market
that will improve the overall economy. The bargain allows our
*creative* expression, it allows their *innovative* expression.

To quote one of my colleagues:

> Companies should be lauded for extracting additional value from the formerly
> fallow copyright resources that belong to the public (like first sale and
> fair use). 

In short, keep your disapprobation to yourself -- I want to work
*with* my readers, not *against* them.


Thank you,


Cory Doctorow,
Former Canadian Regional Director,
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

-- 
Cory Doctorow
http://www.craphound.com

Weblog: http://boingboing.net 

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