As predicted on HN: Kindle Lending Club
kindlelendingclub.com
kindlelendingclub.com
I'm allowed to buy "loanable "ebooks from amazon.com but I can't actually lend them since I'm not from the US. Nice.
Given that the lending feature is only ONE loan for the whole lifetime of the purchase, it's more of a joke. I think people should rather write a kindlebay not kindle lending clubs.
Amazon is also doing this wrong -- an ebook is conceptually either lendable or not. I would say it is, so allowing the publisher to toggle this checkbox seems beyond stupid.
If Amazon is afraid of wide scale distribution (like this kindle lending club) perhaps they just need to define lending as something between 2 physical kindle devices done in a peer-to-peer manner.
That is, I have to be physically next to my friend's Kindle in order to share a book (using some adhoc wifi connection for example). Or, if I want to 'lend' to a friend 1000 miles away -- make the lending happen with a delay of a few days (for 'shipping') and even add some small ($1 ?) cost.
Basically they could have introduced with software all the inconvenience of actual physical book lending (proximity, distance issues) but instead they invented something new: one lending per book lifetime and publisher-defined "lendability".
Of course, the sane option would be to have all ebooks as lendable with some normal limits (say, once per month).
Furthermore, some books are loanable and others are not. It's definitely a publisher thing.
I think the issue here is that publishers are the scared ones. I suspect that ebooks will follow the same path that the music industry did: first with terror, paranoia, draconian restrictions, and maybe even lawsuits; next with acceptance of copying as a way of life, but refusal to make it easy for people by lifting DRM; finally, by realizing that it's usually in their best interest to remove DRM, and then allowing certain distributors to do so--like Amazon.
If the music industry is any kind of parallel, we still have a few years to go before publishers agree to lift all DRM. In the meantime, clever people will simply use any of the Kindle-DRM-breaking scripts out there to unlock the books they've purchased (usually for nearly the same price of a physical book, I might add) or just download them from torrent sites.
However, as you say, the sticking point is the publishers. This is all the more relevant because the profits on most books for authors and publishers are not nearly as good as with music. And also because e-books are far, far smaller and that much easier to share or pirate than albums or movies (even in pdf form a full e-book is likely to be smaller than even a single mp3).
Which I think helps explain some of the skittishness of book publishers. Though a few have already made the jump. Manning (a technical book publisher) allows you to buy DRM free e-books (which come in pdf form and are watermarked with the purchaser's name).
The only lendable book I have is Jessica's "Founders at Work" which I don't want to lend cause I haven't finished it. I'm still on the Adobe guy.
They are probably weighing the possibility of the lendee actually reading it through in 14 days vs the possibility they'll only get part way through (hopefully to the juicy parts) and have to buy it themselves to finish. Thus generating extra sales.
Right now, Amazon has left the decision on whether or not books are lendable entirely to the publisher. Since the activity, lending, is something that is happening on the platform AFTER the point of sale I really don't think the publisher should have much any say in it.
I want to know if Amazon conceded this power to the publishers right off the bat or if they thought about enabling the feature completely in the consumers control first.
But Amazon isn't selling you the book, right? They're selling you the right to read it on your Kindle, as long as they allow you to.
Apparently, Amazon is erring/defaulting to benefit the publishers. That is, books are NOT lendable by default. The publisher, more than likely, has to update Amazon to make the book lendable.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865687 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2052925
(good idea to use adblock on that site)
However, I believe Amazon might update their terms to prevent this.
Unfortunately, I doubt that Amazon exposes an API to perform such crawling. The last thing that I want to do is give my Amazon login and password away...
The website is really just a market for matching borrowers and lenders. They will probably make their money with amazon affiliate links and ads.
Note that Amazon/B&N only let you lend out your books one time, which really limits the lending feature...
Prove me wrong, please ;)
[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&...
The reason that this doesn't work for ebooks is that, unlike a physical book, you're only buying a license to use it (i.e. the same limitation you get on software).
I personally see this as a huge step backwards, and for that reason alone I'll be buying hard copy books for the foreseeable future. I'd love to have a Kindle or another eReader, but I just can't abide the limitations.