Is this the book you're referring to? The one by Peter Watts? Looks fascinating

https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640

The average paperback book weights between 1 and 2 pounds and would cost 2.75 -> 3.25 in shipping for media mail in the US. In addition amazon would take 0.99.

Pulling up a few random books for example https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640/...

I see I can buy it new for about $11 although I wouldn't be surprised to pay $15 in a physical store. Selling it could get me about 10 but I would have to pay about a buck to amazon and around 3 to ship it for a net of 6.

This is 40% - 55% of original value.

Perhaps more importantly lending or giving them in person arguably gives them the same $10 worth of value. Shipping it to someone produces $10 worth of value for 3.

A book that is shared 3 times has produced $30 worth of value. A book that is shared 10 times has produced $100 worth.

An ebook that you might not be able to read in 10 years is SUBSTANTIALLY less valuable than the physical book.

Adding this value proposition back in and removing DRM that strip actual ownership both laudable goals in themselves are entirely at odds. Artificial scarcity is broken by design and unfixable.

I read quite a few others that have been mentioned here, but I finally read two that hard sci-fi books that should appeal to the Hacker News crowd

Permutation City: People can run simulations of themselves or entirely migrate their consciousness into computer programs, but existence is often limited to the amount of computation that you can afford, leading to slow existences that stretch time into fractions of realtime. That premise had me hooked, but the book has fantastic thought provoking plot points throughout. Highly recommended. http://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Novel-Greg-Egan/dp/15...

Blindsight: Amazing first alien encounter book that should be read by everyone that is a fan of the genre. Memorable cast of characters...the Vampires are really interesting. All kinds of introductory scientific concepts throughout. Entertaining and educational. http://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640/r...

by assuming these alien beings would react exactly how human's would

This is a tangent, but Peter Watts's brilliant novel Blindsight deals with this issue (among many others). Describing how would unfortunately ruin a key plot point.

He uploaded the whole novel to his website: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm but in my view it's more than worth getting in paper: http://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640 .

If you like hard sci-fi and haven't read Watts's novel Blindsight, I highly recommend it. It's the only sci-fi story I've read that has dozens of footnotes referencing real papers published in real journals. On the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, it's aggregated diamond nanorod.

The book is CC-NC-SA licensed and available for free online: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

It's also published in real paperback form: http://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640/