Allow resale of digital products
Living in the Cloud is great.
There’s nothing physical so nothing is wasted. The production and distribution of everything is cheaper. No wonder businesses love it.
But what’s in it for the consumer? eBooks can be bought faster, sometimes cheaper and take up less space than their physical counterparts.
But if you hate the book or the CD, software or app, you’re stuck with it.
You can’t sell it on or trade it in. You can’t even lend it to a friend or give it to a charity shop - unless you fancy handing over your whole device.
The solution? A second-tier of ‘app store’ that allows users who want to recoup some, if not all, of their losses to re-sell their digital products to other users.
But maybe then we’d have to simulate depreciation - delete a page from our ebooks, put a scratch effect into our mp3s, scuff the corner of the app icon - to ensure the full second-hand experience is digitally realised.
Ben is a web producer based in London, making video and interactive web things.