Cornering Market on a Book Title. Monopoly?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve noticed something odd with a book I wanted to buy at work the other day.
On Amazon, there’s a single seller with the title. He’s got 4 used copies of the same book. It’s obvious that the title is out of print, and that the seller didn’t get them all at the same place; some are ex-library books, some are marked up by previous owners, some aren’t…
I suspect this guy bought up all of these books in an attempt to corner the market and set his own price.
Would that fall under any kind of monopoly or anti-trust provision?
I can’t imagine it would, but I’ll assume if I did the same thing with petroleum I’d get in trouble…

2

It can’t fall under monopoly controls - think about it - when a book is first published, the publisher owns and exclusively controls the entire world’s supply of that title - and it’s not a problem.

3

Methinks there is a small difference of scale between an out-of-print used book and the world’s supply of petroleum, but that’s beside the point. The point is, this guy has the only four copies of this book available on Amazon.com. That hardly constitutes a monopoly. Go to a used book store and they can order it for you from the trade sources for used books.

4

I don’t agree with you Mangetout. First, the original publisher has a monopoly due to the author’s dealings with the publisher. The reason that the author can give a publisher a monopoly is something to do with his/ her status as a creator of the work: either the government thinks that being the author gives one special rights or they believe that the granting of a temporary monopoly fixes a market failure by encouraging writing. That doesn’t apply to our Amazon seller.

Secondly, not everyone agrees that it’s not a problem. There’s considerable disagreement about how useful the granting of monopoly powers over intellectual property is and what its scope ought to be.

All of which is a preamble to saying this is an interesting question. I’m not a lawyer. Perhaps they’ll chime in. But I am an economist.

  1. I don’t think the seller is a real monopolist. Yes, he’s a single seller, but he doesn’t really have much market power. If he attempts to drive the price much above the costs of locating other copies of the book, there will be entry. It will be worth others finding copies. If there are no other copies it will be worth finding the owner of the rights and issuing a new edition. [what KneadtoKnow said]

  2. Even if the guy is a real monopolist (as he would be if they were the only four copies of the book or of a particular edition), it’s unlikely there’s any clear social harm from his activities. The social harm from monopolies mainly comes from prices being jacked up by restricting supply. Unless the guy is destroying some copies to make the others more valuable, he’s not doing that.

If I buy something at less than what I’m prepared to pay for it, I win. I get consumer surplus. Monopolists attempt to transfer this surplus to themselves. But this is only a problem from the point of view of economic efficiency if this reduces consumer surplus more than it increases seller’s surplus. If an item is in fixed supply or there is first degree price discrimination, this doesn’t happen. All that happens is that the books go to their highest valuing users and that the benefits of this go to the seller rather than the buyers getting a bonus.

Even from an equity point of view, I don’t think there is an issue: it is after all the seller who produced the opportunity for the books to go to a higher valuing home.

So I think it’s more entrepreneurship than monopoly and I’d expect - since this is, after all, small beer - the law would recognise that.

5

don’t even have to go to a used book store nowadays. The OP can go to www.abe.com, which is an on-line network of used booksellers, and type in the book. I’ll bet he finds other sellers with that book.

6

Monopolies in the sense used by the OP apply only to production, not to property. Once an item is produced it is completely legal to buy up all existing copies of it.

However, the owner of the rights can always produce more. A book publisher can do a new edition or print run; an author can find a new publisher.

As a reductio ad absurdum example, the OP’s notion would mean that nobody could ever own an original work of art and resell it. There’s only one, after all.

You can get into all sorts of logical contortions when you apply the wrong definition of a word. They vanish when the right definition is used, fortunately.