And I don't suppose this will help much either...

Yikes! Interesting. Though I know Oxfam have had a big success with their standalone book shop. But I guess we're not allowed to be cross with them...

Emma

It should be possible with this type of thing and Amazon as well, to widen copyright to include commercial sales of 'second hand' books. Whereby, the commercial outlet has to pay a (reduced) royalty to the publisher who passes the authors bit on.

Is this not similar to how radio stations pay for music they broadcast over the air and we receive it second hand through the radio?

I'm sure it could work and I'm all for testing this idea in a court of law or The Society of Authors should be.


Kev.

Could be very difficult to administer in practice, though. Can you imagine the overheads in just tracking down the publishers for every book sold in an Oxfam bookstore, let alone getting the money to them ? A second-hand book could be decades or even centuries old.

They must catalogue their stock though Griff (and I'd exclude charities) so it shouldn't be that difficult especially a truly commercial setup like Amazon and seemingly these guys.

Why should they 'get away' with it whilst the author and publisher misses out.

If it still falls under copyright law then there should be a payment.

Kev.

Agreed, someone like Amazon would be in a much better position to do this, as they only sell secondhand books that they have on their catalogues. But then Amazon would be well within their rights to say "if the little bookshops on Charing Cross Road don't pay this surcharge, why should we".

Perhaps a simpler mechanism might be just to make a payment into ALCS or some similar fund for each second-hand book sold, along with some simple data like the name of the author, and let ALCS distribute it.

I can't help wondering if this is contrary to the spirit of English law though (and I am not a lawyer). Surely once we have paid for a copy of a book we own it completely and can sell it to whom we wish without any obligation to the original creators ? Otherwise I can see Dell wanting a kickback from the second-hand computer market, and of course Gordon Brown will want to charge me some kind of stamp duty when I sell my car.

I'm with Griff on this. Charginging royalties on second hand books sounds like a bureaucrat's wet dream.

Interesting re the second hand book shop. As a buyer of books, I'm all in favour. As a writer of books, I think it's a terrible idea! But... before you can have a second hand market, you have to have someone buying the new books in the first place. I mean you can't have books go straight to secondhand can you?

I wouldn't imagine you would ever have one of these stores on every High Street, but what do I know.

I think I'm right that there is a mechanism whereby artists who sold work for little money early in their career, can claim a cut when it's sold on for a fortune once they're famous. It's not the same, though, because of course part of the increase in value is that the artist has worked to increase their value as well, and deserves a cut of it. It would apply to the hugely valuable tiny print-run first editions of writers who go on to be famous, though.

Most things sold second-hand are significantly less desirable than new ones - cars, for instance - and the market's structure reflects that. Maybe it's a tribute to the nature of books - see the thread on the Sony e-reader - that they do their job so well that whether they're shiny and new or not doesn't matter to an awful lot of people, given a direct choice of them side-by-side in the same shop.

Emma

"I mean you can't have books go straight to secondhand can you?" wrote Roger.

Well, like Emma says, second-hand copies turn up quick alongside the (already discounted) copies on Amazon. More annoyingly, uncorrected proof copies turn up in advance. (Why are there so many of these bloody things?)

They turn up within days of publication in my local Oxfam bookshop too, and I sometimes buy them there.

And then there's the book-crossers ...

Actually, with e-books there's great potential for copies to be sold so they could be rewritten by their keepers - mixed with others and all that 'wheels of steel' stuff ... I'm sure we've been down that line in a previous thread, but thought it worth resurrecting. Anyone fancy turning The Da Vinci Code into something that might have been written by Alan Hollinghurst?

Jim