Say you’re at a party. You eye the host’s book shelf, spot Interesting Title, and pluck it forth. You start to read and find yourself captivated. You can’t put it down; indeed, you wish you could run home with the book right then and there.

The host sidles over and smiles. Ah, yes. Renowned-But-Not-So-Renowned-To-Be-Uncool Author. Are you a fan?

Yes, you say, but I’ve never read Interesting Title.

It’s Author’s best book. I’ve read it a million times, and there’s always something new. Why don’t you borrow it?

You’re taken aback. An otherwise pleasant conversation has taken a sinister turn. One minute you’re innocently discussing Author, the next you’re being invited to commit a crime. Good day, you say and take your leave. After all, you’re no pirate.

All conversations about e-books inevitably lead to the subject of piracy. The Napster card always gets played. Remember all that peer-to-peer file sharing of MP3s? Even grandpa was burning CDs of ill-gotten music downloaded from the Internet! Music sales slumped, and only the combination of iTunes and thug-worthy litigation by the recording industry could save the day.

What about the e-book, though? How can we as a law-abiding (ahem) society prevent a Napster-like calamity in publishing?

Don’t get too distracted by the ongoing emotional debate about digital rights management (DRM) and competing reading device formats; Sony vs. Amazon vs. iPhone; how the soulless “electronic reading device” can never approximate the tactile joy of a physical book with actual pages; how to determine fair pricing and royalty structures; and of course, the piracy, oh the terrible piracy!

These and many other e-book debates, while interesting and not inconsequential, distract from the more profound, and possibly sinister, implications of the e-book. No, I’m not talking about any of those crazy, paranoid delusions about Amazon suppressing controversial content or even summarily deleting books from one’s Kindle.

I’m talking about the death of the used book. The shared book. The physical artifact that persists through time, across decades, availing itself to many overlapping generations of readers. Until now.

Used books. The very term conjures up rainy afternoons spent in the creaky aisles of funky stores with overstuffed chairs and resident cats, volumes on every subject imaginable stacked floor to ceiling. Our collective history, wisdom, and information; our mythologies and imaginations; our successes and our failures.

As artifacts, physical books endure through time. The books on those shelves have had many prior readers. Open a random cover and you’re likely to find birthday wishes, dates, names, places. A phone number. A special kind of currency, used books travel from person to person via stores, garage sales, and thrift shops, even the Lost & Found. Friends and lovers lend each other books and sometimes they’re never returned. And when someone dies, their books remain, ready to be dispersed and rediscovered by still others.

But don’t worry, those days are over. The e-book has given notice to this casual piracy!

Not piracy, you say? If you shared e-books with such flagrant disregard—if it was even possible—it would be piracy indeed.

Sure, such sharing has never been considered piracy, but only because the book as content and book as object were inseparable. Books were merchandise and piracy generally took the form of plagiarism, if only because photocopying an entire book was too time-consuming and costly to be worthwhile, especially if you could find it used.

But make no mistake. Used book sales have always represented lost revenue to the publishers and copyright holders-so much so that they’ve taken the trouble to calculate it.

According to a 2003 article in Publisher’s Weekly, used books accounted for $533M in annual sales in 2002. But wait, there’s more! The article also says that this figure represents as much as $1.5B lost in new book sales. Yeah, that’s right: 1.5 BILLION. In other words, every dollar spent on used books is a three-dollar slap in the face to the new book industry.

Now, read Part II.

By Andrew Dugas