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With the recent changes over at eBay, the sellers of digital items are have had to change there tactics. This sudden change of the rules by eBay, has caught many of eBay’s digital sellers off guard. Many of eBay’s digital sellers have thrown in the towel and closed their stores already. Opportunity Knocks !!

I think that it was time that some one pulled the plug on eBay’s ebooks anyway. The eBay ebook market was flooded and had started to fall apart anyway. With the masses of junk ebooks that went from Clickbank riddled 1cent ebooks to pasted together stolen content to 3page ebooks containing nothing but links to websites, it was all starting to get out of hand. As a legitimate publisher you would fear the day that your genuine ebook has illegally found it’s way on to ebay with resell rights and would diminish in value to 1 cent in no time at all.

Looking at the positive side, many sellers are talking about how to make your digital items in to physical items (on CD and delivered), and that this is the future for digital item sellers. The argument to this is that, “Isn’t this a step backwards?”,as one of the great selling factors about digital items is the “Instant delivery”, the wanting of something and being able to pay and receive it instantaneously. I understand that if the item is packaged nicely it has a higher perceived value. It’s not like this is a new thing, people have been selling like this for years.

You could compare this eBay digital drama to the time when Mp3′s first came onto the scene. Years ago when the future of digitally downloaded music was first discussed. My conclusion at the time went like this, “It will take 2 or 3 generations for digitally downloaded music to become the main stream and the high street music shops start closing”. When buying your new favorite album is not just about the music, it was about the physical act of going to the shopping center, looking around, going to the music shop and choosing your CD (or tape, or record) and walking to the cashier counter with it in your hand, pay for it, and taking it home, opening the packaging, then putting it into your sound system for it’s first listen whilst you flick through the nice little book that comes with the product. You can now add this to your collection, proudly on display on your wall with all your other music”.

Now the point here is that at the time many people believed that music that is non-physical could never be the future.

Now this eBay digital items situation is the opposite way round, digital media becoming physical media. Now do you think that the previous eBay customers who enjoyed digital items for there convenience, instant availability and cheapness are going to evolve into customers that will have to pay more and have to wait for delivery and my big question is will they appreciate nice packaging and little booklets ?

For me as a buyer of digital items , I would use eBay because I could find real bargains containing information I desired and could get it in minutes. I would receive the product and then soak up the information I needed then probably never turn to that ebook again. Out of all of the hundreds of ebooks I’ve read there is maybe a mere few titles that in my opinion would deserve to be a physical product that I could proudly put onto my bookshelf among my collection of real books.

So where is all this going ? I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I do know that the situation right now is opening lots of new opportunities. If you are in there at the start you could do very well. Keep an eye on the blogs and forums to be with the change.

In the meantime you may want to checkout my post about  new options for digital sellers.
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