Why the Second-Hand Ebook Market May Never Take Off

guest · Dec 20, 2019

Why the Second-Hand Ebook Market May Never Take Off
Europe's highest court on Thursday ruled that the exhaustion of copyright does not apply to e-books
December 19, 2019
https://fortune.com/2019/12/19/used-ebooks-resell-market-eu-court/

If you buy a physical book, you can sell it to someone else afterwards—that’s the basis of the longstanding second-hand book market, and it’s something people have taken for granted for generations.

So can you do the same with electronic books? Not according to Europe’s highest court, which issued a ruling Thursday that could have implications not just for the book industry, but for the digital film, gaming and music sectors too.
The case involves a Dutch startup called Tom Kabinet, which has since 2014 been trying to make second-hand ebooks a thing.

At first, it simply tried to run a second-hand ebook market, but publishers took it to court and won a ruling saying Tom Kabinet had to make sure it wasn’t selling pirated copies of ebooks. So the firm rethought its strategy and morphed into a kind of book club. Now even that model has been ruled illegal.
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Sale of second-hand e-books infringes copyright, rules CJEU

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