The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model

As I said, what I have read in just the last month from academic presses goes into the thousands of euro. No individual reader is realistically going to spend all that. And especially not when one is in Eastern Europe and makes a fairly typical living here.

Furthermore, I question your claim that me purchasing a scholar’s book would benefit hurting authors. At least within my own discipline (I’m an occasional researcher when a funded project comes along, and I have published on a number of occasions) authors do not materially benefit from publishing a monograph, getting an article into a collection, or serving as an editor of a collection. It’s all for prestige/career advancement alone. In fact, the PDFs on LibGen are sometimes surreptitiously uploaded by authors themselves, who have little love for the big academic publishers like Brill.

There are two cases in my own discipline where authors do care about sales. One is textbooks, and the other is a case where a group of scholars came together to found their own press so they wouldn’t have to deal with the big corporate publishers any more. But those do not form a significant part of my own reading.

You get a commonly understood set of rights which critically includes the right to re-sell it.

Those rights of ownership tend to be governed by universal standards such as fee simple ownership (of real property), or within the US, the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), which is established at the individual state and territorial level, and includes both perpetual ownership and resale ("first sale doctrine) rights, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code>

"Licenced" usage rights are individually prescribed, at least at the level of individual products and licensors, and may well be specific to individual transactions. The specific rights granted or denied may be changed at any time without notice as well, or simply revoked outright, which has occurred numerous times in the case of digital works, rather notoriously with a version of George Orwell's 1984 sold^Wlicenced from Amazon, Inc.:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106989...> (NPR, 2009)

"The Kindle Lawsuit: Protecting Readers From Future Abuses" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/08/kindle-lawsuit-protect...> (EFF, 2009).

You can 'buy' a house with a restrictive covenant or an airline ticket you can't resell. The idea that 'buy' has some simple universal meaning and you're going to get Amazon for not using it properly is fanciful at best.

Yes, it is true that there are certain restrictive covenants which can apply to real property.

However, those covenants, deed restrictions, etc., etc., are themselves limited and governed by both local/state and federal law, to the Constitutional level in the US (e.g., restrictive covenants based on gender, race, and/or religion are utterly prohibited and unenforceable).

Real estate transactions are also exceptional among those being discussed here in that they almost universally involve multiple lawyers for multiple parties (buyer, seller, lender, buyers' and sellers' estate agents, possibly individual representatives for individuals buying a house together in some cases, e.g., family law / marital disposition of property concerns). Which is to say that this is a very high-overhead and complex transaction.

Which is precisely the opposite of what makes, in general, retail commerce possible.

When I go into a shop and purchase an apple, or a prepared meal, or a set of dishes or cookware, or a toaster, or a magazine or book ... I select product, pay (via cash, debit, or credit), and the transaction is closed, with certain exceptions for warranties and the like, though those have limited applicability for most of the items mentioned.

There are also distinctions in corporate and government purchasing, of both goods and services, where there is often (though not always) a substantial administrative overhead involving contracts and committments, though the two parties are typically operating as equals to at least a first approximation.[1]

And yes, there are other exceptions such as contracts of adhesion (you may find these on travel fares, parking services, and the like), though these both 1) are uniform for all transactions between a given vendor and their customers and 2) are very frequently also subject to strong regulation and limitations as to terms and variability.

But to state that there are no transactions in which ownership rights are near-total and all-but-universally uniform is utterly misleading. To all practical intents, there are purchases in which full rights in at least the material object do in fact manifest.

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Notes:

1. There is of course a range. National-level governments are often the more powerful party in purchase arrangements, whilst local (city, county, and often even state- or provincial-level governmental units) may be the inferior party. But both typically have at least some transactional support for tenders, and institutional expertise, not found in general retail transactions.