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Sunday, 1 June 2008, was the 100th anniversary of the first sale doctrine in the US.

As I’ve mentioned before in this billso.com article on 24 March 2008, the first sale doctrine allows someone who buys a book to resell it or pass it along as they see fit.

This important principle of US copyright law applies to other media, too. Last month, a Federal court upheld the rights of eBay sellers to vend software, according to this Ars Technia article. First sale allows people to resell or give away CDs, DVDs and other works that they purchased.

Creative Commons licenses allow users to share and adapt applicable works, which is an excellent extension of the first sale doctrine.

See this article in Everybody’s Libraries for more details

Related pages on billso.com

• Copyright and fair use
• Creative Commons

After breaking away from Amazon back in 2006, Borders has finally unveiled its new e-commerce web site. This may be a last-ditch effort for Borders, whose revenues are insufficient to service the company’s mounting debt, as I noted in this billso.com article of 28 March 2008.

Borders will try to reestablish its web presence after 7 years of outsourcing by offering free shipping on orders of $25 or more, just like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Borders will also offer free shipping to its stores, where customers can pick up their books. Border’s in-store kiosks will be connected to the new site, so customers can access their wish lists.

See these articles from the Associated Press and the New York Times for more details.

I’m knee deep in paper grading right now, but here’s a quick post with some April Foolishness.

Patrick Altoft has a live blog of April Fools pages and pranks here.

Planning to take over the world? Read the Evil Genius Guide to Business. I’m talking to you, Hank Scorpio!

ThinkGeek and Amazon are selling a book on silly Internet RFCs. A Request for Comments is a document that describes proposed Internet standards and technologies, and there is a long tradition of joke RFCs.

Google continues its annual tradition of gags, as reported on Cnet. This year’s crop includes Gmail Custom Time, a feature that lets Gmail users send thir email messages into the past.

There are almost a dozen Google hoaxes this year, including Google Australia’s gDay, a search engine that travels 24 hours ahead in time.

Google also announced Virgle, a joint venture with Virgin to develop an open-source expedition to Mars. Google’s co-founders describe the project in this YouTube video.

From the Motley Fool and BrandWeek comes two updates on a favorite example of mine: Borders. Amazon had been handling Border’s e-commerce and web storefront, until Borders management ended the agreement in early 2007. Now there’s reports that Borders management is considering selling part or all of the company, after the company suspended its stock dividen and took on additional debt.

As both of the 2008 articles point out, Borders has plenty of competition. Warehouse stores sell bestsellers at steep discounts, and that keeps some potential Borders customers from making that extra trip. Barnes & Noble isn’t in great shape, but at least they’re competitive.

As I mentioned on 24 March 2008, the book publishing business is undergoing significant changes. So it’s not surprising that bookstores are struggling.

From Gizmodo via BoingBoing comes a discussion of electronic book ownership. Electronic books or e-books are digital versions of a book. Users read the e-book on a computer, PDA, or a special e-book reader.

Amazon has its Kindle e-book reader, but I’m not willing to pay US$400 for it. I read enough books every year that Amazon could just give me the reader, and let me buy the e-books. The same goes for Sony’s reader, but at least the Kindle can download books and content through Sprint’s mobile phone network. Sony’s reader has to be loaded from a computer.

Both the Gizmodo and BoingBoing posts are based upon an article in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review entitled The (Potential) Legal Validity of E-book Reader Restrictions, and written by Rajiv Batra, John Padro, Seung-Ju Paik and Sarah Calvert. The article wasn’t available on the Review’s web site, so I’m relying on portions that were posted to the Gizmodo post.

The used paper book

In the United States, paper books may be resold according the first sale doctrine. This rule helps support the used textbook market, by allowing book purchasers to transfer their ownership of a book to another party without violating the copyright holders’ rights. A key point of this rule is that no copies can be made of the book. The book’s owner cannot run down to the copy shop, make a backup or archival copy of the book, and then resell or return the original copy.

As I pointed out on 4 February 2008 in my discussion of this Kevin Kelly post, electronic media are a copy of an original source file. The Internet is a massive digital copy machine, after all. Web users are looking at copies of files their web browser has retrieved from other servers. Batra and his three co-authors address the implications of e-books upon the first sale doctrine. Could a used e-book market exist? Probably not, because e-book purchases don’t have their own physical copy of the book. They might have a license to use an electronic copy of the book.

As the four law students point out, it is up to the courts to determine if purchasing an e-book license is comparable to purchasing a paper book. The authors then discuss the restrictive DRM that Sony and Amazon have added to their electronic book hardware.

Selecting a textbook

It’s enough to give me a wee headache, especially as I evaluate new textbooks for my courses. Instructors use textbooks so students have a ready resource and reference in the course. Textbooks are expensive and heavy, especially in graduate courses. E-books are a nice option, but electronic gadgets are heavy and expensive, too. Many users have problems reading an e-book, and sometimes its difficult or impossible to make notes in an e-book. Paper books don’t need electricity, either.

I really like paper books, but I fear that their days are numbered. Textbook publishers are more sensitive to student complaints about textbook costs these days. The textbook industry has seen what’s happened to the music publishers. It’s not hard to find scanned electronic copies of popular textbooks on file-sharing services. When a significant number of university students stop buying textbooks, we may enter a runaway change scenario. Some academic authors already self-publish their textbooks, so they can offer paper and digital copies at a low price and keep more of the revenue. At some point, the major textbook publishers have to decide what business they are in: the paper book publishing business, or the content distribution business.

Textbooks unbound

I have spoken with two publishers who offer shrink-wrapped versions of their textbooks. These are unbound versions of textbooks. The pages are three-hole punched, so students can slip the book into a binder, or carry the chapters they need for a specific day. This business model sounds more reasonable than an e-book.

There’s a catch, of course. A shrink-wrapped book cannot be returned or sold back to a university bookstore in many cases. So a shrink-wrapped paper copy of a book is, in some ways, as restrictive as an e-book. Of course, students can sell or pass along their used binder books to other students. Unless a student examines that binder closely, they are trusting that the binder includes every page of the book. It’s much easier to pull pages from a binder than from a traditional bound book. That’s one reason that bookbinding helps maintain the value of a paper book.

It’s possible to copy a bound book, of course, but it’s a much faster process if the binding is removed. The scanned or copied pages look more consistent, too. The book’s resale value is destroyed when the binding is removed, but the electronic copies of that paper book can be redistributed.

The unbound paper textbook is a sign that textbook publishers are dealing with runaway change that may outpace their companies abilities to adapt and survive. I haven’t mentioned other tactics the textbook publishing industry uses to lock-in customers and enhance value, including custom publishing, digital and web-based content.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• Copyright and fair use
• Creative Commons
• 3 June 2008: 100 years of first sale
• 24 March 2008: The used electronic textbook
• 4 February 2008: Better than free
• 5 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright?
• 17 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law