Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
February 8, 2013 07:43 am GMT

Amazon To Set Up Secondhand Ebook Marketplace

Amazon-Kindle1Amazon wants to sell your used ebooks. It recently won a patent to allow people to hock off their read ebooks on its marketplace. Of course, ebooks dont suffer from wear and tear, but think of the resale process as more of a way to transfer your book licences. This is already in action in a wayusers can currently lend out Kindle books, which then disappear from your device as your friend holds the copy in their digital libraries. Another service called ReDigi also exists, launched about a year-and-a-half ago. The company has pointed out that Amazons patent, filed in 2009, employs a different technique of reselling, where a copy of an Amazon book is downloaded to a new device as the old one is deleted from the original owners bookshelf. ReDigi says that its method is different: a users copy is moved to ReDigis servers before it is downloaded to the new device. The company says this means that the book isnt copied, and that only originals move around. Sounds like semantics to me, since Amazons method allows for only one copy at a time, anyway. Nonetheless, the startup must be dismayed. Amazons patent indicates that it wants dibs not just on your digital products but their afterlife as well, which doesnt bode well for other online secondhand marketplaces.

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/W4zpPd_GRO0/

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article

Techcrunch

TechCrunch is a leading technology blog, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.

More About this Source Visit Techcrunch