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Comment by bhousel | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is great news for my weekend startup, Booklends. I think that the 'try before you buy' model will work great for eBooks. So I'm creating a website http://www.booklends.com to let Kindle users borrow and lend books with other users.

Certain books (depending on if the publisher allows it) can be loaned from one user to another for up to 14 days. Booklends will let you keep track of all your books and let you make wishlists of books that you want to borrow from other people.

My site is coming together quickly, now I just have to get it finished and launched! :)

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Hopefully this isn't a surprise, but there's one out there: http://www.kindlelendingclub.com/

Though I do like your name better.

Haha, yeah it's not a surprise.. I didn't know they were creating their own site - I thought they wanted to just keep it as Facebook group. But by the time they launched, I was well into it, so I decided that I may as well finish what I started.

> so I decided that I may as well finish what I started.

I like the spirit. I'll keep an eye on booklends. Hopefully it will be fewer romance novels and more good books.

Thanks! I'm going to try to just support all the books that are lendable.

But to your point - I've found that there is a surprising amount of romance/erotica novels on Amazon Kindle. I have my crawlers doing common searches, and it turns out that a large number (more than I'd expect anyway) of the books on there are of the shirtless-dude-on-the-cover type.

With a Kindle, nobody else on the bus knows what you're reading...

If you can make your site intelligent enough to stop sending me "you have a lending request" emails for books that I've already lent, I'll switch! ;)

Catherine here from KindleLendingClub.com - You've put your finger on one of the pain points for our users :) A challenge of developing a community platform around Kindle lending is that there is no straightforward way for us to hook into Amazon's Kindle lending system to determine whether a loan did or did not actually occur. We're trying to work around this by asking lenders to "confirm" the loan at the time they do it, but it's a necessarily imperfect workaround that we're refining in our next iteration. If for some reason a lender doesn't click to confirm the loan, the lender's book loan offer remains live and triggers reminders when there are other borrowers for the title.

To stop lending request reminders for a particular title, you can delete the loan offer from your profile: http://www.kindlelendingclub.com/myprofile.htm

If you need help or have feedback, we're just an email away: info@kindlelendingclub.com

theres also http://lendle.me

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