The Disappearing Used market

The greatest threat to the media market is the used media market.  That is what publishers think.  It is not piracy.  It is not recession.  It is the second hand market.  Because of this, we are slowly losing the right to buy and sell used material.  The first major example was the e-book revolution.  The e-book revolution promised consumers cheaper books, because the entire manufacturing step was removed.  It promised vast libraries of books on a tiny device that you can take with you anywhere.  Neither of those things came true, though.

E-books cost the same as the physical book.  The DoJ is currently going after book publishers because of this fact.  They were colluding to keep book prices higher.  Second, you can't sell back the book or give it to a friend.  My wife's grandmother would buy a book.  After reading it, she would give it to my mother-in-law.  After she read it, she would give it to my wife.  With e-books, they can no longer do that.  Since e-books are not cheaper, you don't have the ability to buy a vast collection of books.  Your e-collection ends up being smaller than the physical collection you would have had.  Your book budget doesn't increase just because you went digital.  If anything, it decreases because you had to pay for the e-book reader.  The only people I know with a vast book collection downloaded the books via alternative means.

A rumor has been circulating that the to-be-released Xbox 720 will lock game discs to the console that you own.  This doesn't just attack the used game market, it destroys it.  This is a major attack on the First Sale Doctrine.  This "feature" kills console gaming for me.  I think this will decrease game sales drastically.  With sports titles, the gamers who buy the newest games pay for the new games by selling the old versions to a second set of gamers: the ones that don't need the latest version.  Then you have people like me who won't pay full price for a game unless I absolutely know I will love the game.  For other games, I check the local Game Stop periodically to check the used game price until it is low enough for me to buy.

This new e-world will reduce the amount of media honest consumers will have access to.  The only people with access to large collections are the ones who pirate the material.  The producers will accuse the pirates of causing the slow sales.  Something needs to be done to this single-direct-sale-per-person business model.