> Copyright has a thing called the first sale doctrine. You buy a book and now that copy is yours. You can sell it to someone else or lend it out etc., which is what libraries do. They don't have to negotiate with publishers at all, they just go to a book store and buy books.
Part of the challenge is that reselling digital goods in a way that doesn't allow you to resell to multiple people isn't a solved problem. Crypto is probably the closest to a solution, but obviously that isn't widely adopted in a way that would work for ebooks yet.
> Part of the challenge is that reselling digital goods in a way that doesn't allow you to resell to multiple people isn't a solved problem.
This isn't even close to a new problem. Anyone with a printing press can print thousands of copies of someone else's book, make them look like the original and sell them. The thing that prevents this is that if you do it you can be sued. There is no technical measure preventing it, it's just against the law to do that.
If anything digital copies make this easier, because each copy could have a randomly generated UUID and then if you're selling 50 copies without 50 distinct legitimate UUIDs, you're caught.
NFTs are a (highly problematic) attempt to do this without a central authority: there's no reason not to have an authority, so we can use regular old public-key cryptography.
Why are NFTs highly problematic? I'd argue that a central authority is highly problematic as it will end up looking like the existing Google / Apple marketplaces with no ability to resell, etc. Removing the central authority would allow organic resale markets for form, etc rather than "approval" blocking any real technical progress.
"Central authority" in this case would be the equivalent of the property registry that governments maintain. Since governments are also the ones who actually protect your abstract property rights when it comes to that, there's no reason for this registry to exist on a blockchain.
Part of the challenge is that reselling digital goods in a way that doesn't allow you to resell to multiple people isn't a solved problem. Crypto is probably the closest to a solution, but obviously that isn't widely adopted in a way that would work for ebooks yet.