Ethicist
And now, a piece from The New York Times. Or The New Yorker. Or the New York Yorkie? The New Yorkington Picayune?
Is It Ethical to Buy Used Books and Music?
The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on what consumers owe to artists.
May 14, 2025
Is it ethical to buy used books and music instead of new copies that will financially reward the author or artist? What do consumers owe to producers of art? — Gerald Barker
From the Ethicist:
There’s actually a lot to be said for buying used and sustaining the low-cost democracy of art’s second life. For one thing, there are environmental advantages in the practice: Physical media are designed to endure and be shared beyond the first owner. And artists can benefit from secondary markets in real, if less tangible, ways. Works that circulate widely can enhance the artist’s reputation, whether it’s a book read and passed along, a record rediscovered in a thrift shop or a painting resold at auction. Enthusiastic new audiences, prominent displays and word-of-mouth appreciation can all contribute to a creator’s stature. (Notice that this situation is very different from music-streaming platforms, where artists are basically meant to be paid for each listen, but the recompense is often a pittance.)
What artists, especially the good ones, are owed is not a cut of every encounter we have with their work but a system that gives them a real opportunity to sell their work, to build a career, to find a public. After that, their creations rightly become part of the wider cultural world, as with books in a library or paintings in a museum, where countless people can enjoy them freely across the generations.
Used-book stores or vintage-record shops, where hidden gems lurk like geodes waiting to be split open, play a role, too. Such venues don’t just preserve art; they bring enthusiasts together, spark conversations and cultivate new audiences. In Michael Chabon’s novel “Telegraph Avenue,” a vintage-record shop is both a community hub and a battlefront for cultural preservation; in Helene Hanff’s book “84, Charing Cross Road,” treasured titles help sustain a human connection across an ocean. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I stumbled across both in used-book stores, providing their authors no royalties but plenty of affection. This setup isn’t a failure of fairness; it’s part of how creative work gains cultural traction.
Oh, wait a second. Are we mad that I copied this entire article, New York Times? Are we mad that I got this as a gift and then passed it on?
That’d be kinda fucked-up, right?
But isn’t this how “creative work gains cultural traction?”
This is the moment where your creation became part of the wider cultural world, as with books in a library or paintings in a museum, where countless people can enjoy it freely across the generations.
I mean, your words, not mine.
This opinion skates very close to the early 2000s “Dispatch said they only got famous because of Napster,” arguments where bands were saying that it was thanks to file sharing that they became a success and people who didn’t want to pay for music used that to justify, well, stealing it.
Of course I’m happy for artists, who choose to do so, to give away their work for free. Same way any restaurant can choose to give away food, any coffee shop can choose to give away coffee, and any donut shop that’s near my house and please god do it I ask for so little could give away free donuts to me every day.
And the keyword there is “choose.” The artist, the person who did the work, should reserve the right to decide whether it’s free to all or not.
Now I see the subtle difference here, so let’s move away from the digital for a moment. Well, digital objects, but not digital transactions.
Oh, you naïve, sweet ethicist…
I refuse to learn how to type an umlaut “i” just for that word and will forever type it without, right click on it, and resolve it that way. This is the “keyboard shortcut.”
Anyway, I think the ethicist missed something super important here: The asker didn’t specify whether they were buying used books in person or online.
And that’s an incredibly important distinction.
The Ethicist is definitely picturing a romantic version of a used bookstore, winding passages, piles of books everywhere, that book smell some of us love and some of us think smells like hallucinogenic mold, and some of us smell both something delicious AND a trippy mold and got library science degrees so we could really snort that in AS A CAREER.
But there’s a real difference between buying used IRL and buying used online, even if the objects are physical as opposed to digital.
IRL, if you have a used bookstore down the road, that money is staying in the community, at least to some extent, so even if the author isn’t getting the money for that copy, someone where you live probably is. TWO people, in fact, because someone also got some money for selling the book to the used bookstore.
IRL, I think there’s an argument for fostering the popularity of an author within a community of limited, IRL size. There’s a possibility of talking to a person IRL who has read the same book you have.
IRL, most used bookstores also carry some new stock, and we can definitely argue that if an author is super popular on the used market, their next new title will probably be one the bookstore buys.
IRL, it can be hard to buy specific things you want, especially if those things are not super popular and wouldn’t make the shelves at Barnes and Noble. So you kind of have to snap those items up when you can.
IFL (In Fake Life? Can we make that a thing?), doesn’t benefit the community, doesn’t benefit the author nearly as much, doesn’t benefit a fellow community member, and a lot of times, IT’S NOT EVEN CHEAPER!
But, Pete…Isn’t The Secondhand Market Kind of How Libraries Work?
Not really.
I mean, I get where you’re coming from with that, Me from a few seconds ago. There’s a similarity on the consumer end because you are literally reading a book someone else has read before.
So what are the differences?
For one, libraries buy new in almost all cases, I mean like 99.9999999999%. The only situation where we might not would be a situation where we REALLY needed a title and it was out of print or ridiculously priced, and those situations don’t really come up, well, almost ever. Consider it’d have to be something that’s out of print, popular enough to warrant dropping a fair amount of money on, and it’d have to be inaccessible through interlibrary loan. That’s a slim subset of the book world.
Second, I think people will check things out from the library they wouldn’t buy otherwise. Oftentimes, I check stuff out that I wouldn’t have purchased, either because it’s something I’m not sure about or it’s something that’d be so wildly expensive to buy that it’s prohibitive, even to a rich, Substack-funded writer like myself (manga series are a good example, I COULD buy Dragonball and Dragonball Z, and it’d cost me $300 dollars, not to mention my marriage because I’d have to build a library just for the adventures of aliens named after vegetables punching each other A LOT).
Third, more than half of readers who are introduced to an author in the library go on to purchase that author’s works. The world of music downloading can’t make the same claim: when someone steals album A, well, I guess Kid A, there’s no proof they go on to buy other Radiohead albums because they don’t want to pay for the privilege of feeling vaguely sad.
Fourth, libraries do A LOT to market books, and they do it for free. I work in library marketing, trust me, we put a ton of work into getting books to circulate, and man does that seem like pretty high-value commercial time and space.
I can hear the gears turning, some of you saying, “But, Pete, aren’t the arguments you’re making for the library a lot like the arguments Napster made for—”
SHUT UP! Just shut up, okay?
No, it’s not the same. Because there’s a massive difference between having a physical copy of a book that is circulated within a limited geographic area and can only be used by one person at a time, and the distribution of a digital file to the entire world, a durable file that won’t degrade or be unusable after a certain number of checkouts.
Here’s what I think:
Buy from artists you love:
Buy from artists you love when it benefits them most: presales count as first week sales, and that means the first week of a book or an album’s release is the time it’s most likely to crack bestseller lists and have its largest organic reach barring some event down the road that changes things. If you love an artist, be willing to get their work in presale, before it’s released.
Buy from artists at times in your life when you have the ability:
We’ve all been broke. Some of us for long, long stretches…that just never seem to end.
Look, I’m not going to shit on anyone for bargain hunting. But if you’re in a place in life where you can afford it, totally, buy books from artists you love.
Buy from artists directly when you can (and look at what else they sell):
Plenty of writers sell their own books on their website, often signed!
Lots of writers, especially, have Substacks or Patreons or other shit going. If you like what they do, subscribe to those things, pay for them.
Some writers also sell little things like stickers and pins and shit, so buy those if you can.
Buy SOMETHING.
Review things you liked:
Seriously, give it 5 stars. Nobody fucking cares, it’s not like the integrity of your reviews is being violated when you give it an extra star. If you bought it used, consider giving it an extra star in terms of “enjoyment out versus price in.”
Evaluate whether used really is all that cheap:
Some things are a fuckton cheaper used, and that’s usually stuff that was pretty ubiquitous and has faded over time. Other things are not. For example, DO NOT BUY ONE OF MY BOOKS ON EBAY FOR 3 TIMES THE PRICE!
Using my previously-pitched idea of giving an extra star for paying a lower price, even if you moderately enjoyed Skeleton Army, you’d have to give it zero stars, just mathematically.
Browse Used, Shop New:
I think the best thing about a used bookstore is to go in and just have a wander, maybe find a book or two you want, but if you want a specific book, preorder it. Preorder from your favorite used bookstore, if you can! But when you just want to hit a bookstore, not necessarily to find a specific book, just wander a bit.
What Do You OWE An Author?
Nothing, really. Nobody can force you to pay for anything, and the morality or ethics of it are, in my opinion, highly situational.
If you live 2 blocks from an awesome used bookstore and you’re buying and selling there, wheeling and dealing (I’ve never understood the “wheeling” part of that saying, what does that even mean?), you’re doing something for the local economy, and maybe it’d be nice to do something for the authors you like as well, but, whatever, we can only take on so many causes at once.
If you’re buying used online, and you’re saving a couple bucks, and you’re supporting an evil megacorporation and forcing someone to drive an energy-using vehicle to your home to deliver a single book—maybe it’s less about what you owe the individual author, more about what you owe the world.
I guess, at the end of the newsletter, my take is that it’s all about (used copies of 50) shades of grey.
Buying used books isn’t evil, it’s not morally wrong.
But, if you want authors to keep writing things you like, buying their shit new is a whole lot better.