Selling books in the digital age – are digital rights exhausting?

In the physical (paper) world Copyright has gotten well established as to what the ground rules are when dealing with books.  You sell a book.  Well and good.  In the USA and the EU (under different but similar law) the purchaser can sell the book on to a third party when they have finished with it.

Now the clincher to the deal is that they cannot retain a copy and continue to use it.  The simple control is that the purchaser will not pay unless they get the one and only paper copy (first edition, hardbound, paperback, signed copy, with cover, and so on) at the bargain price. Read more