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Comment by bhousel | Hacker News Reader

No surprise here. I made a site last year that did almost the same thing as LendInk, but I decided to shut it down after Amazon made it very clear that they didn't want me doing that.

From what I understand, there were a half dozen or so other sites that would facilitate ebook lending, and we were all pressured by Amazon similarly. Most of those sites are no longer around.

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If you read the article you'd see that this site was not shut down because of Amazon at all.

Yes, I know that Amazon didn't shut them down, a bunch of C&D letters from authors did.

My only point was that Amazon does not support people who run these ebook lending sites, and I don't think there's much of a future in it.

Of course Amazon doesn't support it-- they, like the C&Ding authors, subscribe to the kool-aid of "everyone that was lending these books would have been a sale".

Not only do they support it, they actually pay a higher royalty rate to authors who enable lending (making the book lendable is one of the requirements for the 70% royalty tier). If you make the book an Amazon exclusive, you even get paid something when the book is lent (at least for the period of exclusivity).

Just to be clear, LendInk facilitated lending through Amazon, not a service they were providing. They were simply matching users who had the same reading interest.

I doubt Amazon pressured them into shutting down considering LendInk is sending business their way.

Um, the whole point of LendInk is to not send business their way. Business would imply purchasing. LendInk is a way to avoid purchasing.

LendInk used Amazon's affiliate program. That means (up until Amazon dropped all California affiliates) Amazon would send a percentage of all sales made by that visitor over the next 24 hours to LendInk, as a "thank-you" for sending them traffic.

Sure, but they might have shopped at Amazon anyway. Given Amazon's size, it's likely they'd do so anyway.

True, and of course Amazon takes that into account when they set the terms of the affiliate program.

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