

Congratulations: You Killed LendInk And Denied Fellow Authors Lend Royalties - sp332
http://aprillhamilton.blogspot.com/2012/08/congratulations-you-killed-lendink-and.html

======
hluska
First off, I support LendInk and think these authors behaved like children.
Heck, I was outraged I even blogged about it.

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?

~~~
Jun8
Well, they _don't_ want to show any restraint, AFAIK. The saga of
clueless/greedy/whatever authors against technology is much larger than this
particular case, e.g. just two days ago it was reported that the Author's
Guild is seeking $2B from Google for book scanning and making snippets
available, that's $750 for each book! Many authors back these efforts.

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.

~~~
anthonyb
Why is $750 per book so outrageous? Books on average would make far more than
that, so it doesn't seem completely out of the question.

~~~
noonespecial
$750 isn't outrageous... For the authors to pay to Google for that kind if
publicity/advertising.

~~~
anthonyb
It's not specifically publicity or advertising though, is it? They're indexing
the entire text and making that available publicly.

------
waterlesscloud
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.

~~~
Foy
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.

~~~
jonhendry
"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.

~~~
Foy
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.

~~~
toyg
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.

~~~
Uchikoma
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.

------
njloof
When you restrict people from legitimate use of copyrighted work, they respect
copyright less. Nice going, rights holders.

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jlarocco
Is there a list of authors who worked to shut the site down?

I doubt I read books by anybody so clueless, but just in case, I'd like to
know which authors not to buy.

~~~
tolos
Someone on slashdot put together a list:
[http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3035829&cid=4092...](http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3035829&cid=40927681)

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-...](http://www.digitalmediamachine.com/2012/08/what-happened-to-
lendink-owner-explains.html)

~~~
FireBeyond
The apology was pretty weak.

"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.

------
ecrotty
I tried my best to defend this site. I was in the thick of it with many of the
authors that frankly were quite simply, technically challenged as to how the
site would work.

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! :)

------
jrockway
This sort of thing always confuses me. If I were an indie author, I would want
my book to be as widely read as possible. If I got more money upfront in
exchange for what amounts to free advertising ("jrockway? never heard of him.
but sure, I'll read his book for free."), I'd call that a pretty good deal.
But I guess someone heard the word "free" and thought it would be a good idea
to prevent any transaction that doesn't generate new money...

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sp332
Well this is a tad disturbing:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XXRdrja...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XXRdrja27CcJ:www.lendink.com/faq/+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)
The Google cache of the FAQ page has a bunch of spam drug phrases on it... Did
the page really have all that hidden on it when it was live??

~~~
crazygringo
There are site viruses that serve up normal content to normal users, and so go
undetected, but serve up spam like that only to GoogleBot, since they're
designed to affect PageRank etc. of specific sites.

That was likely the case.

------
kevinpet
This is a poor article. _Who_ shut it down? The ISP? In response to complaints
from whom? Amazon? This is what goes in the first paragraph, not buried in the
middle of paragraph nine.

~~~
Semaphor
> "At this time, the host company is only advising that they have received
> hundreds of threats regarding possible lawsuits if they did not take
> Lendink.com down immediately. I do not know personally if it was a result of
> authors, publishers, Amazon or other rights holders. I have not personally
> been in contact with anyone other thaan the host company. I do however have
> a certified letter awaiting my pickup at the post office which is from a
> company called Noble Romance."

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-...](http://www.digitalmediamachine.com/2012/08/what-happened-to-lendink-
owner-explains.html)

------
gnu8
Its important to remember that there is nothing wrong with lending someone
your digital book, the same as lending your physical book. You don't need the
author, vendor, or any third party intermediary to authorize you. If any party
attempts to use DRM to infringe your moral rights, it is morally right to
break that DRM, law be damned.

~~~
sp332
I'm not sure intellectual property would exist at all then.

~~~
gnu8
I'm not sure if intellectual property exists either.

~~~
sp332
If a person writes a book, and a publisher prints and sells a ton of copies of
it without giving any of the money to the writer, that doesn't seem to be
moral. Even if it is moral, it doesn't incentivize people to try making a
living at writing, since they will rarely be able to compete with big
publishers. So: if we let authors claim copyright, and force publishers to
come to terms with the authors for an acceptable royalty, then _in general_
there will be more authors. If we balance copyrights correctly, our society =
will take some damage from skewing "property" to include "intellectual
property", but it should be smaller than the total good of having more
authors.

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Kerrick
While it sucks that _any_ legitimate site had to go through this, I'm it was
LendInk and not Lendle.me that got the brunt of this. I have a bunch of lend
credits on the latter, but have never used the former.

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rprasad
An alternative way to look at it: When you use technology to do things in ways
your content producers don't understand, they respect technology less.
Eventually, they fight back, even if the technology does improve their
situation.

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._

~~~
sp332
There was a FAQ that explained in detail how the site worked. According to the
site owner, most of the people who read it were no longer angry. Apparently
almost none of the people sending hate mail to his web host even bothered to
visit the site, they were just going by stuff they read on facebook.

~~~
jlgreco
Exactly. A rational defence works in courtrooms but is largely useless against
angry mobs. If people are angry at you before they even meet you, there is not
a terrible lot you can really be expected to do. Not without an advertising
budget anyway.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Communication is not limited to simply laying out facts in FAQs. There are
more effective ways to communicate quickly and cleanly what you do, calm folks
down, then explain the details.

~~~
jlgreco
What would you suggest in this case?

~~~
waterlesscloud
Distill what you do into one paragraph or less, including specifically how it
benefits the content creators.

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.

------
franzus
> Lend Royalties

I have the bad feeling that it's somewhere in the range of Spotify royalties
where Lady Gaga gets ~$100/month.

~~~
sp332
It's 100% more than they get when a physical book is lent.

~~~
ghurlman
So, still $0?

