

As predicted on HN: Kindle Lending Club - riffraff
http://www.kindlelendingclub.com/

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fierarul
Apparently it's a US-only feature.

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_ ).

~~~
acabal
Amazon has already demonstrated that it's more than willing to sell DRM-free
products, as evidenced by its DRM-free MP3 downloads.

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.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Amazon has publicly stated that they want to move to DRM free e-books
eventually.

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).

------
forensic
So many books are not lendable! What is the criteria I wonder?

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.

~~~
Pyrodogg
The criteria is whether or the publisher feels they can "hook" additional
people by letting you lend the book a single time.

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.

~~~
w1ntermute
> 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.

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.

------
luckyisgood
"as predicted on HN": i did a search on previous discussions on kindle and
lending, if someone's interested, here they are:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865687>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2052925>

~~~
flatline
Not to rain on the parade, but I predicted this about 30 seconds after I heard
of the Nook's lending capabilities. The first obstacle is the TOS for the
lending service (unknown), the second came later when they announced a book
could only be lent once. I would love to see it take off but I'm really
skeptical that the publishers would let anything like this slide.

------
bcaulf
I've got your Kindle Lending Club right here:
<http://thepiratebay.org/browse/601>

(good idea to use adblock on that site)

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tszming
This is superb cool, I loaned the "Coders at work", after 30 minutes, received
an email and go to Amazon to deliver the book to my Kindle.

However, I believe Amazon might update their terms to prevent this.

------
sleight42
The killer feature necessary to make this app truly awesome: crawl my Kindle
collection and let me decide which books to make shareable.

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...

~~~
kachnuv_ocasek
The last thing you want to do is to die.

------
raquo
I don't understand how it works from that website. Maybe it's evident to
Kindle owners, but from the outside it makes little sense. E.g. the
"(absolutely risk free)" in the "Lend a book" button as opposed to "(always
free of charge)" in the "Borrow a book" button makes me think there are hidden
charges or something shady going on. Or maybe it's all free, or these charges
are just evident? I don't know.

~~~
jfno67
To lend a book on the kindle you just have to enter the name and email of the
borrower. Then the book is removed from your kindle account for 14 days, and
it will stay in the borrower account for 14 days. It is free to borrow and it
is risk free, because after 14 days Amazon is transferring back the book.

The website is really just a market for matching borrowers and lenders. They
will probably make their money with amazon affiliate links and ads.

------
rajbot
There is a similar site for Nook lending: <http://bookfriend.me/>

Note that Amazon/B&N only let you lend out your books one time, which really
limits the lending feature...

------
oscardelben
The site returns a lot of 500 errors randomly. I requested to borrow a book
but it's not clear wherever my request succeeded or not. It looks like this
website was being made in a rush.

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mcdowall
I love the design and the concept but if completely free where is the business
model other than being just an affiliate channel?.

~~~
dangrossman
That's a perfectly reasonable business model for a site with almost no ongoing
costs other than hosting.

------
olalonde
Wouldn't it be trivial to duplicate the books you borrow?

~~~
mbrubeck
Not _trivial_ since the Kindle has a DRM scheme that is intended to prevent
this. However, I'm sure that the DRM has been or will be broken, like just
about every widely-used DRM system.

~~~
duskwuff
Has been. The DRM scheme turned out to be pretty weak. The unusual file format
used by some of their books (Topaz) proved more of an obstacle.

~~~
burgerbrain
This seems to only be true for the 1st and 2nd generation kindles. The PINs
for the drm on the 3rd generation kindles don't seem to be generated from the
serial number of the device.

Prove me wrong, please ;)

~~~
acabal
There are scripts out there to unlock even Kindle 3 books. The method involves
downloading two scripts and unlocking it through a certain version of Kindle
for PC. (New versions of KfPC don't work). Search for 'unswindle'.

------
chapel
This is interesting, but could it be against the TOS?

~~~
NSMeta
No, lending is a part of Amazon Kindle. [1]

[1]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200549320)

~~~
gsivil
"Eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days" Does any
one know if lending dead-tree books is legal? It sounds ridiculous I know but
is not it outrageous that you can not lend your own e-book to whomever you
want for as long as you want as many times as you want, or it is just me?

~~~
bryanlarsen
There's a typo in your comment. You said "your own" e-book. Just because you
paid for it doesn't mean you own it. Amazon does as much as it can to pretend
that it's your book so that it can justify charging full price for what is
actually much closer in practice to a rental.

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leon_
Now let us re-sell our "used" e-books and I might see a sense in paying (dead-
tree-price - $2) for an e-book.

------
jpr
Yay for business models based on artificial scarcity!

