jonathanbrightlight Volunteer Community Mentor
KrazzyKats • Volunteer Community Member • 
If they’re selling copies that they have purchased, they do not need your permission. They are allowed to resell them.
If they are listing them but have not yet purchased them, they are likely planning to purchase them from you if they get an order on eBay. This is against eBay policy, but very difficult if not impossible to prove, and it still is only a policy violation because they are engaging in drop shipping without a valid contract in place.
The only time they would need your permission is if they were creating their own copies of your book, which I guarantee they are not because it would not be economical. That is what copyright is for: the right to make copies.
I am an author myself. My book is listed on eBay, though I did not give anyone permission to do so. There is nothing you can or should do about it.
If you wrote a book and someone bought and read it, they have the right to resell it if they don't want to keep it.
What they aren't allowed to do is to photocopy your book and sell copies. But it doesn't sound like that's what's happening.
Please clarify.
The first sale doctrine lets buyers of copyrighted works use or sell them however they want, but it doesn’t allow them to copy or modify the works.
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@krazzykats wrote:The first sale doctrine lets buyers of copyrighted works use or sell them however they want, but it doesn’t allow them to copy or modify the works.
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Correct. And I’ve yet to see or hear of a case where that was what was happening, where someone was actually selling unauthorized reproductions of a self published author’s books. The cost and work involved in getting it printed and bound would be far more than any profit they could make from our little books.
Almost always, these posts are by authors who have set up their books with a Print On Demand service (I use IngramSpark, but several others are popular), and their books are available on at least Amazon. Sellers here on eBay create listings for those books, sometimes with minimal markup and sometimes with huge markups, but they don’t actually have the books. If they get an order on eBay, they’ll go ahead and place an order from Amazon or one of the other places the book may be listed, with the customer’s address. Only then will that book even be physically created, and the author’s account will show a sale happened (often very delayed, and with no way to track it to where it was sold).
It does violate eBay’s drop shipping policy, because the seller here on eBay does not own the book or have a contact with a drop shipping company, they’re just purchasing the book after they sell it. But that’s ridiculously hard to prove, except for a buyer of that particular book from that seller on eBay. And they do this with a huge number of books by many different authors, so they just hope that at least a few will end up being popular enough to sell, but the vast majority of the listings they put up on eBay will never sell. They just don’t care because they haven’t paid for them, and in all likelihood had the listings created in some automated way or at least in bulk, so they put minimal effort into listing them on eBay.
