What makes a used bookseller ethical?

There is a dirty secret at the core of almost every used bookstore. They are selling books without any benefit for authors. Why am I calling this a dirty secret? It is because in other formats this type of action would be considered piracy. The legal framework for allowing this resale without compensation has been grandfathered in with antiquated ideas. This is when books existed to be purchased, read and then sit on a shelf for decades before being pulped for new paper stock. In the new resale economy the lifecycle of a book is changing and so we must change our expectations around what is acceptable.

Rights and eBooks: Why the Old Rules Don’t Fit the New World

This tension between resale and author compensation is not just philosophical—it is embedded in law. The European Union’s Copyright and Information Society Directive (2001/29/EC) was a landmark attempt to harmonize copyright rules across member states and adapt them to the digital age. It introduced measures to protect creative works and ensure fair compensation for authors, while acknowledging the challenges posed by new technologies.

At its core, the directive insists that creativity cannot survive without economic support. As recital (10) states:

“If authors or performers are to continue their creative and artistic work, they have to receive an appropriate reward for the use of their work.”This principle is foundational. Without compensation, the incentive to create erodes, and the cultural ecosystem suffers.

The directive also draws a hard line against piracy and counterfeit distribution. Recital (22) makes this clear:

“The objective of proper support for the dissemination of culture must not be achieved by sacrificing strict protection of rights or by tolerating illegal forms of distribution of counterfeited or pirated works.”In other words, accessibility cannot come at the expense of legality. Yet, when physical books are resold endlessly without benefit to authors, the ethical distinction between legal resale and piracy begins to blur—especially when compared to digital formats.

Perhaps the most relevant provision is recital (28), which introduces the concept of “exhaustion of rights.”

“Copyright protection under this Directive includes the exclusive right to control distribution of the work incorporated in a tangible article. The first sale in the Community of the original of a work or copies thereof by the rightholder or with his consent exhausts the right to control resale of that object in the Community.”This means that once a physical book is sold, the author’s control over that copy ends. This principle made sense in a world of paper and ink, where copies were finite and degraded over time. But in the digital era—where eBooks can be duplicated perfectly and resold infinitely—the logic collapses. Should the same exhaustion rule apply when the “copy” never wears out and can circulate forever?

Finally, recital (35) acknowledges that exceptions may exist but insists on “fair compensation” when rights are limited:

“In certain cases of exceptions or limitations, rightholders should receive fair compensation to compensate them adequately for the use made of their protected works.”This opens the door for new models, such as resale royalties or licensing fees, to ensure authors are not harmed by evolving distribution practices.

The directive was written at the dawn of the digital era, yet its core ideas remain relevant: authors deserve fair reward, and rights should not be sacrificed for convenience. As eBooks and resale platforms proliferate, the question is whether these protections will evolve—or whether authors will continue to lose out in a system designed for a world that no longer exists.

The logical imbalance at the core of second hand book rights

Importantly we can see that digital resale and reuse has been summarily ruled against. Digital copies of books cannot be purchased, resold or reused by other readers. In the Recent Anthropic judgement the AI company was ordered to pay $3,000 per copyrighted work that had been pirated from online libraries. The reproduction of this work was the core of the ruling. Digital piracy is something that is easily tracible and the potential losses to a creative are great. Authors may lose thousands of potential sales if their books are included in these online repositories.

It is this theoretical loss that is being insured against. This goes back to recital 10 from the Copyright directive. “If authors or performers are to continue their creative and artistic work, they have to receive an appropriate reward for the use of their work”. The double edged sword here however is that the distribution of a digital file is the same type of problem as the distribution of a physical object. The order of magnitude is smaller but the total losses to authors is significant. While a digital file may be downloaded thousands of times physical book resale can also lead to thousands of copies sold in this shadow economy outside of Author’s control.

Surely part of this comes down to feasibility. Digital piracy is easier to track than physical sales. Online traffic inherently has threads of data that can be used to enforce rulings whereas physical sales are fractured and exist outside of any centralized system. In a world that is increasingly digitizing however even physical book sales are becoming possible to track. With this possibility also comes the ability to compensate authors for the sale of their work in the second hand market. Not because it is required by law but because supporting authors is what makes an ethical bookseller. Anyone failing to accomplish this is capitalizing on a legal gap to profit off of someone else’s work.