Comment by waterlesscloud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by waterlesscloud | Hacker News Reader

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Thinking about the other side of this for a moment, it does seem pretty obvious that LendInk changed the situation the authors thought they were getting into when they agreed to make their books lendable.

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.

But those lendable books could only be lent once, right?

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.

"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.

I guarantee you that I have a book I have loaned out more than once.. a couple times, in fact. Amazon only lets you lend it once, for up to a maximum of, what, 2 weeks?

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.

I think there's a bit of a "disillusionment factor" at play here.

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.

They - and many others - didn't understand that distribution (costs) was what they were paid for and content was much less valuable than they thought.

"You say that a site allowing lenders to be matched to borrows would... what? You can only loan each book once."

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.)

http://www.paperbackswap.com/index.php

Not totally free (due to shipping), but it's definitely cheaper than buying all your books new.

I don't think too many of the authors actually held the position you describe. You describe a situation where authors understood LendInk and didn't like the way it changed lending, but if you read the complaints from authors that accused LendInk of piracy, it's pretty clear the authors didn't understand what LendInk was doing and just reacted from a position of ignorance rather than informing themselves.

There is one author who is complaining on the LendInk FB page who seemed a bit clued in. She was objecting to the fact that the site allowed you to lend books to anyone and not just your friends and family like defined on the Kindle Lending page on Amazon.

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.

In the UK there is an inter-library lending system, so if your local library doesn't have a book they'll borrow it from one that has.

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)

there were several other sites making it possible.

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