This idea is derived from the earlier idea I’d posted about around peer-to-peer lending & borrowing of Kindle ebooks.
If you take that a step further, and tweak the lending duration from ‘x weeks/months’ to ‘forever’ – then it becomes nothing but a secondary sale market for ‘used’ Kindle ebooks.
Amazon would be hard pressed to have users pay for a fixed-duration lending/borrowing arrangement between friends – because there is no cost to doing so in the real world with physical books. However, in case people want to ‘lend forever’ (basically sell their ebook to someone else), Amazon could definitely look at monetizing the transaction. From a user pov, if I bought an ebook for $20, and now I’m done reading it, I would happily sell it to someone else for $10.
To prevent cannibalization of Amazon’s ebook primary purchase revenues, maybe, Amazon doesn’t let me set the price below a certain threshold (say, not more than a 10% reduction from what I paid for it). Or maybe, Amazon doesn’t create an open marketplace, and I can only sell it to people I know – this would not only restrict this secondary ebook market from exploding, but would nudge me to add my friends on my Amazon network (I believe this will achieve a long-standing objective that Amazon has likely always had – the desire to know who my social network is – which is evidenced in the fact that they’ve been showing me wishlists of my friends since years).
Even though this idea has the potential to cannibalize Amazon’s existing Kindle revenues, but I would propose that there is still more merit to this idea, and needs further exploration with evidence and data – especially since this idea could also eat into not only the existing physical book primary market, but also the physical book secondary market which as of now has zero competition from Amazon.