The other day while ordering some books at Amazon.Com I noticed that the pages describing the books I was interested in also contained a link toward the bottom that I could follow to buy a used copy of the same book. Except for rare exceptions, such as when a book is out of print, I am not interested in used books, but I thought it was a very cool feature that could really help out people with less money or less psychological hangups about used books than me.
According to the Washington Post, this new feature is not going over well with publishers and writers who feel like they’re getting ripped off since they don’t make any money off the sale of used books. Some of the angry commentary against the feature is hilarious.
Author Michael Chabon told the Post,
It’s so irritating. Do they have to put it on the same page? Couldn’t they make it a little harder to find?
Small press publisher and writer Fran Baker said,
I’m not opposed to used bookstores. That’s where you can pick up readers for your new books. But to put a used-book button on the same page as a new title makes no sense. This is bad business for everybody.
It’s simple economics — in highly competitive markets, profits should steadily decline. Welcome to competitive markets, authors and publishers.
The real problem with used books, of course, is that most used books are not in the best condition. You might save $4.50 on a book, but what if it has a left over cigar odor from its previous owner? Yuck.
On the other hand Amazon is also doing this across other product lines and this would make great sense for CDs and DVDs.