I’ve just been listening to this week’s episode of TWiT, and they were discussing one of the big problems, in my opinion, with the Kindle and ebooks in general: the lack of sharing and resale.  With old-fashioned paper books, you can loan them to your friends and sell them online or at a used bookstore.  However when you purchase an eBook on the Kindle, it’s tied to you and your account.

I would love it if Amazon would set up a system where you could loan your book to someone for a specified period of time (during which you were not able to read it), or even sell the book to a friend (or a stranger online?).  Of course I can’t imagine that any publishers would allow this because they want to make more money selling more books.

The problem I have with this is when you purchase an eBook, you don’t own anything.  You’ve purchased the right to look at it, but you can’t transfer it our take it where you want.  We’ve seen this before with the music industry.

You used to buy records, tapes, or CDs to listen to your music.  You could buy them, loan them to your friends, and sell them to a used music store.  You can still do that.  However in the late 90′s MP3 players (the iPod in particular) and iTunes came along and changed the industry.  Now it can very well be argued that the price of music, as a digital medium, is pushing towards zero.

You can see where I’m going with this.  It appears that the Kindle is equivalent to the iPod and Amazon is Apple for the eBook market (though I think Apple will have something to say about that soon).  However, there are a few key differences between production of books and that of music.  The recording companies have much more value to artists than the publishers do to authors.  There is still plenty of value in having a top end recording studio and producer to help up and coming artists.  It’s not a cheap process to make music sound good.  Anyone with a text editor can write and distribute a book.

I’m oversimplifying the process of writing a book a great bit here, but it is still much easier and less costly to write a book than to create an album.  If the distribution model becomes digital, then authors no longer need publishing companies to put their content in readers’ hands.  I’m not suggesting that books are going to be free anytime soon.  Music is still not abundantly available [legally] for free, and books are just now beginning this transition (a transition that music began a decade ago).

Chris Anderson is somewhat of a leader in this idea that eventually digitally reproducible products will have their prices pushed to zero.  You can get his new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price for free in many places around the web.  He uses economics to make the argument that “free” is coming and business models needed to be adapted.

Back to my original point though.  In the near future, I believe authors will begin to cut out the publishers, cut down the price of their books, sell them as digital products on the Kindle or other device, and maybe even grant users more leeway in lending and reselling the book.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon take control of the resale process.  They would allow you to sell your book through your Amazon account and receive money through their payments system.  However, Amazon would take a percentage of that price and distribute part of that back to the author.

Of course all of this will be met with great resistance by publishers and their affiliates.  Hopefully instead of fighting what’s inevitable, they see the change coming and are planning on adjusting their businesses to survive (i.e. not spending too much money on producing physical books and focusing on becoming a means of promoting and editing books.  Particularly for inexperienced authors).