Generally, the price premium of goods already reflects the resale value. One could see this with automobiles. Make/models with higher resale value get priced hi

Generally, the price premium of goods already reflects the resale value. One could see this with automobiles. Make/models with higher resale value get priced higher on the initial sale. Also, you would be amazed at the amount of book returns that exists in the industry. Publishers routinely bake the cost of those returns into the hard/paperback's retail price and deduct the cost of the returns from royalties paid to authors. Most unsold pbooks are <gasp>destroyed!</gasp> This is because this is the relatively lowest direct cost option compared to the bookseller returning the book back to the publisher. For an example with self-publishers, see: https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/making-your-book-returnable https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/making-your-book-returnable If a self-publisher chooses to have the book returned to them (in the hopes that they can directly sell it from their author website), they are also charged the shipping & handling (deducted from the royalties). The reason I bring this up is because, the publishers would rather the used books sales completely disappeared. That is part of the reason why they don't hesitate to destroy the returned books to avoid crashing the price.