Digital Rights and What's Left for the Author

"[…] The reaction to the news earlier this year that Amazon had a patent to sell secondhand ebooks was almost universally strong: it could ruin authors' livelihoods, said some commenters. It was dangerous for publishers, said others. It's just boggling my mind, said most. […] there's also the gnarly issue of who, exactly, owns an ebook. John Scalzi, bestselling novelist and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is up in arms over Amazon's secondhand ebooks patent […].

     'We don't know exactly what Amazon's planning to do with this. Every tech company out there files patents for things, but they don't necessarily have a plan to use them,' he says. 'On the other hand … there is likely to be interest in a secondhand market for electronic books, and the question then becomes how we balance the consumers' rights with the simple fact that pristine electronic copies of books are likely to undercut the incomes of the creators.'
     Scalzi can understand why consumers might be interested in selling on their ebooks – but 'is an electronic file exactly the same as a physical object?' he ponders. 'Some say absolutely, no matter what, if you buy it, you've bought it. Others say, if I have a book and take it to a used book store, when I give them the book, it's gone, whereas with an electronic book, it's possible I can make a copy for my archive, and resell the pristine-looking copy.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Buy all of John Scalzi's books (none of them secondhand) here...