Congratulations: You Killed LendInk And Denied Fellow Authors Lend Royalties
aprillhamilton.blogspot.com
aprillhamilton.blogspot.com
However, I'd like to play devil's advocate for a moment. A few weeks ago, the Ryan Holiday fiasco went public. If you don't remember this, he was the guy who lied his way into coverage in mainstream media (ie - ABC, MSNBC, the New York Times, etc.) This was a situation where journalists didn't check their own facts (in this case, they didn't vet their expert) and they printed lies.
A few months ago, ABC tweeted that Hosni Mubarak had died. Turns out he was still alive (and it took journalists about twenty minutes to figure that out).
Journalists are in the business of fact checking, yet they've been caught many, many times unknowingly spreading hoaxes. Social media is incredibly powerful (now), but it will become useless if we don't teach civilians how to check their facts before they start lynch mobs.
Anyone have any ideas how we can guide users towards showing some restraint in similar situations?
That would look like some notional acceptance that they were doing something illicit whereas they were merely providing, it seems, a matching service for people wanting to legally lend books to one another.
Where's the RoI for complying with false take down notices?
As stated elsewhere along this topic, sometimes author's have a moral viewpoint that lending books to complete strangers using the internet violates the spirit of the feature. Look at it from their point of view - they want readers' family and friends to benefit from the lend, but not the wider internet.
Sure, there isn't anything legally wrong with lending books to complete strangers, but working with the author and respecting their wishes can (maybe) generate goodwill that could have avoided getting LendInk taken down in the first place. That said, I don't operate an e-book lending site, so I may be way off base here. Considering that many authors wanted LendInk taken down (and later apologized for it), that's certainly possible.
Anyways, at a minimum, you could provide them with a direct link to their book's admin page on Amazon (if that's possible), instructing them how to disable the lending feature, re-iterating that you'll of course remove their book from the site when they do so.
It's a small thing, and may not have mattered, but names carry a lot of power.
My (optimistic) feeling is that a small circle of businesses is brainwashing the authors, citing music piracy and the "success" of RIAA in suing pirates and the authors are taking the bait.
Given that, it's not surprising their first reaction is anger. Perhaps not rational, but humans are not inherently rational beings.
The authors thought "Lend my book to a friend? Sure, why not? Good word of mouth always helps!" A nice, forward thinking perspective.
But what LendInk makes possible is for lending to extend beyond normal social connections. You could go look for any book you wanted, never buy another book again. And each book would be lent the maximum number of times. There's a fundamental difference at work there, the dynamic changes considerably.
You could say "Well libraries work the same way! Buy once, lend forever!" But libraries are geographically constrained. And there are a lot of them. So being able to be lent anywhere in the country still means you sold a lot of books. It's fundamentally different.
So while this site certainly didn't promote piracy and authors were compensated when appropriate, it did subvert the terms they had agreed to, and it did so willfully.
I can see where the content creators are coming from there.
This is probably a good idea, and probably inevitable and unstoppable. But that doesn't mean it has to be on the same economic terms as the previous model.
So if you buy a book that's lendable you'd be able to "trade" your lend for someone else's lend. At best you're only getting one free read for every purchase.
That's a far cry better than some people I know who only read books they borrow from friends. Which, in meatspace, you can lend an infinite number of times.
Well, no, because in meatspace you have a more limited social circle. Few people would lend a physical book to a complete stranger, or if they did, would know they'd probably never get it back. Plus of course time is a limitation, and if a borrower is not local, there's the time of transit back and forth, which doesn't exist for an e-book.
And as a practical matter, it is pretty unlikely that you'd be able to find a borrower for every one of your physical books. But that would be possible with e-books, given a way to lend them to strangers, because of the way the site can match borrowers to lenders.
Not totally free (due to shipping), but it's definitely cheaper than buying all your books new.
In meatspace I can sell my book to a friend... or give it away.
Why is it that with ebooks some authors feel enititled to a sale for each and every person who wants to read their book? That is never how books worked in the past.
I thought all this information technology would liberate information, not restrict it to such an extent.
You say that a site allowing lenders to be matched to borrows would... what? You can only loan each book once.
Content producers thought the digital world would remove distribution costs while maintaing the same per-unit price and increasing number of sales, hence multiplying profits. They didn't understand how distribution costs would disappear for consumers as well, making "original copies" indistinguishable from "second hand".
Now they're starting to understand, and they think (or have been told by "old media" companies) that this will put pressure on price-per-unit, people will "steal" it and sales will collapse, and they'll all go broke. Hence the constant outrage.
Old internet geeks, by now, know chapter and verse about the need for new business models, the reality of p2p actually growing the market as a whole etc etc; but these people don't, they're like Metallica circa 1998. Most of them don't even make much money; talking to them about new business models is like trying to convince your average "bodega" shopkeeper that he should think about advertising in the NYTimes or on TV.
Yes, but everyone with that ebook can lend it once. Matching sites like the one under discussion make it more likely that an ebook will be lent, than would be the case if the customer were just lending to friends (I know I have books that are of no interest to any of my friends, so without a matching service, I would never lend them to anyone.)
She didn't like it because if Amazon allowed a lending service to match up anyone who wanted to lend on the Amazon site then she expects she should be getting paid royalty rates like libraries have to pay to lend to anyone.
You never hear authors railing against libraries, even though (in the UK) very many more books are read via libraries than bought new. But publishers, especially in the US, are vigorous about lending ebooks.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9722000/9722410....)
(Last segment of programme, starting at about 20minutes in)
I doubt I read books by anybody so clueless, but just in case, I'd like to know which authors not to buy.
edit2: Chrystalla Thoma said some negative things on facebook but never contacted LendInk, she has apologized. https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=3891497111...
As a side note, at least one of the authors did apologize -- and was instantly lynched in the comments http://www.digitalmediamachine.com/2012/08/what-happened-to-...
"Oh, hey, I was one of the ones who attacked you, your site, host, business.
You got shut down, even though you did nothing wrong… Sorry."
I'm paraphrasing, but that was pretty much it. No regret, no "what can I do to help?", "I'll try to correct the disinformation I spread", just a literal "I'm sorry." The end.
I was in the accusation threads on Kindleboards ..
You can see a lot of the back and forth there. It was really spiraling out of control. So much so, it was ripe for disruption (it likely still is) as many of the authors were (and are) looking for methods to have essentially DMCA takedown notices on cruise control.
(seriously, there seems to be a big market for this amongst the indie authors that don't have a handle on some of the more technical and copyright issues at hand. ps. if anyone wants to know more or talk through ideas, reach out.)
Anyway, I put forth quite a bit about how the whole Amazon associate world works (in plain terms) and how other sites, that have been around much longer and were MUCH bigger (no offense LendInk) such as lendle.me (which if memory serves had their site name challenged because they got on the amazon radar back in the day).
I dunno.. I was pretty amazed to see how quickly it all unfolded and how others jumped on board without a full understanding of how the site functions worked.
Sorry to hear about the whole situation. I have a site in the same space (but not lending) and its unfortunate to see the door closed on what could be a very good (and profitable) promotional engine for both the site and the book authors.
EDIT : a bit more of the backstory
I can add something valuable from being a part of the thread. A big problem for some of the early authors was that their books were NOT available to be lent (as per author -- I didn't verify).
ASSUMING this was accurate of some of the initial outraged authors and not the "hey get my book down" others that came along in time, I put forth the idea in multiple threads that perhaps the devs of the site got too much data in a sweep via the API.
In other words, they didn't bother to get books that were available to be loaned. And, did just a big sweep across the Amazon API looking for any and all Kindle books.
Somewhat makes sense -- the more books, the more opportunity for affiliate tag clicks. And, it probably errors out (or did) saying this book is not eligible. I believe an author even confirmed this early on.
It was this simple oversight that REALLY added the fuel to the fire.
Hope that gives some additional insight to those that weren't part of the madness.
Enjoy! :)
That was likely the case.
and
>"The hosting company has offered to reinstate Lendink.com on the condition that I personally respond to all of the complaints individually. I have to say, I really do not know if it is worth the effort at this point. I have read the comments many of these people have posted and I don't think any form of communication will resolve the issues in their eyes. Most are only interested in getting money from me and others are only in in for the kill. They have no intentions of talking to me or working this out. So much for trying to start a business and live the American Dream."
source: http://www.digitalmediamachine.com/2012/08/what-happened-to-...
Lesson? Make sure you explain how your technology works to the people who are providing your content. They are the ones you need to convince, because if you can bag them, they will become your biggest supporters and users.
Find an author who you have benefited and get them to give a testimonial.
Basic stuff, really.
Then, and only then, lead them off to a faq with details.
Lendink needed to have a dedicated page or section, for authors, telling them what they were doing (in layman's terms, not exact terms) and how the authors would benefit, and how the authors could opt out (i.e., link to Amazon's page on opting-out of lending, if such is possible for self-published books).
The greatest weakness of 99% of website/SAAS startups is that they don't realize that their target market may not have the technical skills to do much more than turn on the computer and navigate to gmail/hotmail.
I certainly agree with your second statement, that getting content producers on your side can give you strong supporters and users, but that should only represent a marketing/growth issue, not an existential threat.
Not if those technology "inventors" want to make money from said content.
He merely ran an unprofitable service that helped lenders lend their books in exchange for being lent a book. Also, he got lynched for it.
I almost cannot imagine the amount of stress this must be causing him.
I have the bad feeling that it's somewhere in the range of Spotify royalties where Lady Gaga gets ~$100/month.
The artist gets very little in any of the cases.