Tom Kabinet Creates A Platform Where People Can Sell Their Ebooks Second Hand

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Below is our recent interview with Marc Jellema, Founder of Tom Kabinet:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Tom Kabinet?

A: Tom Kabinet is a platform where people can sell their ebooks second hand. Our readers sell the ebooks they’ve read to our collection in return for credits. Readers can buy our second hand ebook for € 2 a piece. These € 2 will get you any ebook, including international best sellers, from our collection.

We launched Tom Kabinet (meaning empty book cupboard in Danish) in the summer of 2014 out of frustration: how come ebooks are pricy to buy without the possibility to sell it if you no longer needed it? It was and is our strong believe that once you buy something, you own it and if you own something you have the right to resell it. The property you own being digital or tangible shouldn’t make a difference. To cut it short, we believe digital exhaustion of copyright exists and our platform proofs it does. Publishers believe otherwise and that is why ever since our launch we have been in and out of court with publishers. Last April we appeared at the Court of Justice for the European Union and they will come with a verdict somewhere in the next couple of months. As always, exciting times!

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Q: How exactly does it work?

A: Let’s first start with the selling of your ebooks. In Europe, when you buy an ebook from a retailer, you get a download link. This download link gives you your unique acces to your copy of your ebook. You can download your copy to your device like eReader, smart phone, tablet or what have you. After you’ve read your ebook, you can upload the link you have received with your purchase to our platform. We check if the link is valid, and if so you receive fifty credits for sharing the link with us. As a final step you are responsible for deleting your copy of the ebook from your devices and that’s it.

That brings us to the buying of a second hand ebook. 10K-plus users look at our website on a regular base to search for their next ebook to read. If they find the title they’re looking for, they purchase the ebook form our collection for € 2 and fifty credits. Once the ebook copy has been paid for, the user can download it to the device of their liking.

One very important thing to mention is that we love authors. They produce the (e)books we all read. That is why we donate 25% of every ebook that has been resold via our platform to the authors. This donation is not mandatory, but we think that writers deserve to be paid for when someone uses their copyright protected work.

Q: What are credits and how do you get them?

A: Our platform uses a collection of ebooks donated by the users. People buying second hand ebooks from our collection have a free choice if the like to hold on to the ebook or donate it back to Tom Kabinet after reading it. We’ve created the credits to incentive our users to donate ebooks back to the collection and we are very happy many of our readers actually do bring them back. If you bring your ebook back within two weeks of purchase you get up to 90% back from the credits you have spent purchasing the ebook. After half a year this percentage is lowered to only 5%.

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Q: What kind of books are available in your collection?

A: Currently our collection exists of Dutch, including translated international best sellers, leisure ebooks only. As soon as the court cases are history we’ll be expanding to other languages. Also we are looking into adding professional and educational ebooks to our collection and platform.

Q: How would you convince the reader to use your platform?

A: Our users in general are readers that read more than three books per month, who believe new ebooks are overpriced and doesn’t want to have an all you can read subscription on collections that are missing most new releases for the first 6 months. If you recognize yourself in our general user, feel free to give our platform a go: the credits for your first ebook are on us.

Q: What are your plans for the future?

A: Tom Kabinet has been developed to be a highly scalable platform that can easily travel to other European and worldwide countries. We need the verdict from the Court of Justice for the European Union in order to scale to Europe. After that we have plans to move into South America with Spanish titles. I think that will keep us busy for the next twelve months or so.