

What happened to LendInk? The owner responds. - sp332
http://www.digitalmediamachine.com/2012/08/what-happened-to-lendink-owner-explains.html

======
ilamont
Author of the featured blog post here, and a long-time HN member.

I would like to share a few observations about the nature of the independent
author community, based on the Internet discussions that preceded the
suspension of LendInk (see
<https://www.facebook.com/pages/LendInk/124974504234948> and check out the
threads and comments from August 2), as well as my own experience as an ebook
author:

* Even though indie authors are using the Kindle platform to publish their work, many are not aware of the "fine print" governing their participation in the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program or KDP Select.

* Technology skills are very focused in this community. Authors are generally very good at using Internet discussion boards and other Web channels to promote their work. But not everyone understands the differences between reading devices (which are significant) or how secondary software features work.

* On the production side, many authors are turning to services like Smashwords or freelancers to handle the conversion of Word files to the formats that Amazon/Sony/BN/etc. accept for upload.

* There is a lot of sensitivity around price (see the comment thread starting here: [http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2012/03/barry-joe-scott-turow....](http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2012/03/barry-joe-scott-turow.html?showComment=1331421267759#c8276460451533121089) ) and free giveaways (like KDP Select, <http://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/KDPSelect> ). This translates to intense worry about whether authors are losing out or getting cheated in some way.

In my opinion, the factors listed above as well as the general reluctance of
people to read through EULAs and long FAQs disassociates authors from the
processes and policies that govern how their work is distributed, marketed,
and sold. This, in turn, can lead to serious misunderstandings.

I am not excusing the witch hunt that took place, but am simply trying to
identify the factors that led to LendInk being suspended.

------
dangrossman
I've been reading the comments on Twitter and Facebook by book authors that
wanted this site shut down. What's surprising is that even if they're
convinced the site wasn't hosting their books and was sending people to
Amazon, they're still against it -- they feel they agreed to allow people to
lend their ebooks to friends and family, but not to people they met through a
lending club website.

~~~
davidw
> they feel they agreed to allow people to lend their ebooks to friends and
> family, but not to people they met through a lending club website.

They're probably just going by what they feel is 'normal' with "real books",
which isn't an entirely unfair starting point.

~~~
jonhendry
Spirit vs. letter.

It's no surprise this sort of thing would pop up. It's not unlike the problems
that arise due to things like car sharing and airbnb, when insurance companies
and landlords get involved.

Insurance companies are probably willing to let it slide if you let someone
else who's insured drive your car, and landlords generally allow you to have
guests. But lending your car to complete strangers, for money, and letting
complete strangers stay at your apartment, essentially short-term sublets, are
not really what they are prepared to tolerate, at least not without altering
the terms and rates they charge for coverage or rent.

~~~
DanBC
> _Insurance companies are probably willing to let it slide if you let someone
> else who's insured drive your car_

In the UK insurance companies will go out of their way to deny claims.

~~~
jonhendry
Probably makes sense, since it's relatively easier for the car to be spirited
off to mainland Europe and beyond.

~~~
toyg
That's not the case. The difference in driving laws (right vs left lane) makes
it fairly difficult to move cars between GB and mainland Europe, because cars
have to be physically modified.

Insurance companies are just out to make as much money as possible; in Europe
their life is hard because they don't enjoy the ridiculous margins from crazy
markets like US healthcare, they have to obey stricter regulation, and suffer
from heavy rates of fraud in many countries.

~~~
jonhendry
Eh? It's easy to move cars between GB and Europe, because there are car-
carrying Chunnel trains and ferries that help you do so.

EBay Germany has plenty of RHD cars listed from German sellers.

And what side the steering is on doesn't really matter if you're just going to
chop it up for parts.

~~~
toyg
Yes, but this is not comparable to cars being "spirited off" across the
continent, which don't need to be split up or modified: I can move a car from
Prague to Paris and get full whack for it. This is not the case for the UK
market, which enjoys a little bit of a barrier compared to the rest of the EU.
Proof of this is that the secondhand market is still very much alive, because
car prices are higher than elsewhere, since there is less pressure to align to
cross-European prices. That is not the case in, say, France or Italy.

------
bhousel
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.

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

~~~
bhousel
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.

~~~
pseudonym
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".

~~~
Turing_Machine
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).

------
lr
The difference is a matter of scale. I believe the loaning of books is allowed
the same way you could loan out a physical book to a friend, etc. Loaning out
a digital book to n people is just not the same. Likewise, libraries, which do
loan out physical books to n people (but still less than is possible with a
digital loan), pay more for their books for this very reason. If you want to
loan out your digital book to n people, then you are going to have to pay a
lot more for it (and that is just not part of the current equation).

~~~
slig
IIRC, you can only loan a Kindle book exactly once and to one person.

They're being unreasonable and pushing people who cared enough to to jump
through that to just buy or pirate it.

~~~
sp332
Yup, each buyer can only loan each book 1 time.
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200549320)
And only on books where the author explicitly allows, which makes this
takedown even sillier.

------
frankydp
Some guy made a compilation of the author comments he could find on FB.

[http://www.2abd.com/politics/copyright/lendink-taken-down-
by...](http://www.2abd.com/politics/copyright/lendink-taken-down-by-asshole-
indie-authors/)

~~~
Jun8
How can these two clueless authors be informed? Should we form a similar mob
and boycott them? Send an explanatory email to each? How?

~~~
pyre
Seeing as a number of the authors have since deleted FB posts / Tweets related
to this, I would assume they know that maybe they were wrong and are trying to
distance themselves (rather than do the honorable thing and admit that they
were idiots that reveled feeling righteous while in joining in on a witch
hunt).

------
nicholassmith
I must admit the biggest thing I took away from this is how disappointed I was
at the sheer refusal from some authors to fact check, read up or even visit
the site. One apologised on Facebook as they joined the angry mass without
understanding the site at all, and now they do they retracted their previous
complaint.

EULAs are long unwieldily things, but if you're publishing digitally
understand what terms you agreed too before raging out at some slight.

~~~
smashing
The fact is that authors just don't understand that they are needed less.
There is a transformation from printing on dead trees to the freedom that the
Internet gives people without copy restrictions. Its cheaper to build a
computer network than it is too print a book in many places!

~~~
nicholassmith
I must admit I'm a big fan of autogenerated novellas. But I'm going to guess
you actually mean publishers not authors, which is at the moment still not
true for several reasons.

------
funkdobiest
Let's see what we can do to address these issues, 1) get a hosting company
outside the US, and that is hardened and resilient enough to shrug off
frivolous C&D letters. 2) get a PO BOX address, or just use a mail forwarding
service outside California so you can make money on the affiliate program
again. Just look at the grey area sites (Torrents) to see how it is done.

~~~
DanBC
I see grey area sites that have had years of harsh and aggressive treatment.
See, for examples, pirate bay (prison sentences etc); oink (years of legal
stuff ([http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-found-not-guilty-walks-
fr...](http://torrentfreak.com/oink-admin-found-not-guilty-walks-
free-100115/\))); demonoid shut down; and MegaUpload. (Whether these sites
needed legal action is another discussion. I mention them here merely as
evidence that it's not as easy as hosting something outside the US.)

Being outside the US does nothing to make a person immune to US laws and law
enforcement.

~~~
pyre
The issue isn't law enforcement though. He wasn't breaking any laws. He was
just being harassed. It costs money to defend against a million lawsuits, even
if they all get thrown out of court. The site was basically DDoS'd via the
legal system. He wasn't even riding a grey area.

------
bryanlarsen
It never would have lasted anyways. The author kept the site running in the
hopes that he would eventually be able to collect Amazon affiliate revenue. I
imagine that Amazon would have cut the site off very quickly.

~~~
sp332
It looks like he used to make Amazon affiliate revenue, right up until they
cut off all affiliates in California over a sales tax collection dispute.

~~~
bryanlarsen
But I bet Amazon was not aware of what he was doing at the time. Amazon has
made it quite clear that they do not support sites such as LendInk.

~~~
pyre

      > Amazon has made it quite clear
    

A link would be useful to this discussion, because

    
    
      > they do not support sites such as LendInk
    

does not make it clear whether this just means they don't actively support
them, or if it means that they would _actively_ reject them from the affiliate
program over it.

Amazon doesn't 'support' blogs on various topics, but many of them may be on
the affiliate program.

~~~
bhousel
FWIW, I ran a site last year very similar to LendInk, and was told by Amazon
to make changes that they wanted within 48 hours or they would close my
Associates account and Product Advertising API access. They do keep the Kindle
lending club sites on a tight leash.

It is possible to run a site like this and stay on Amazon's good side, but not
easy.

------
endersshadow
Isn't it just called LendInk? Like, ink that you put on paper?

And yeah, it's a shame. Obviously the authors didn't realize what they agreed
to (or at least the implications of that). They should have some action taken
against them for false DMCA notices.

~~~
sp332
Yup, fixed, thanks.

------
alan_cx
So, am I to understand that these "artists" and "publishers", who seem to not
know much about their own terms of business, are the type of people that Kim
Dotcom was raided like a major terror suspect on behalf of?

If so, something is insanely wrong here. Very wrong. Sounds very much like
this was a very legit business taken down by pure paranoid ignorance.

~~~
sp332
LendInk was taken down by an ignorant mob of authors (some of the participants
have since apologized). The MAFIAA is a calculating, organized group of
distributors. I don't think it's the same thing. Either way it's pretty clear
that the law, copyright holders' expectations, and users' expectations are
nowhere near lining up.

~~~
alan_cx
Of course its not exactly the same thing. I was looking at it in a global
context. And globally people refer to it as "piracy". I think there has to be
parity across the board. If not, every one ends up looking silly. In mass
media terms, these subtilties are not noticed, it all gets wrapped up as the
same thing. In some ways it weakens the anti piracy arguments when yet again
they, as a mass, get it so badly wrong. See where I'm coming from? People will
point to this case and say, "see, these idiots are acting irrationally". Tar,
brush and all that.

------
205guy
Nobody is pointing out Twitter's and Facebook's role in this affair. Sure,
they are just tools (pun intended), but their very nature (short statuses
broadcast directly to social network) makes rumors and heresay take on more
sinister proportions. Everyone praises the services when they enable Tunisian
or Iranian protestors or supporters of the Oatmeal, but there must be
thousands of these "minor" witch hunts going on in schools and other small
communities such as that of indie writers.

ilamont's top comment sums up the set of circumstances (I would be less
generous and call it a "mentality") that led to all these knee-jerk reactions.
Heck, it didn't use to be called a "vanity press" for nothin'.

------
savramescu
I bet that author that's featured in the article didn't even try and see
what's actually happening with LendLink.

I wonder if next they're gonna go for Amazon because they're posting reviews.

~~~
mcguire
There has been a stack of kerfluffles over at goodreads, specifically
featuring authors and reviewers.

[http://cuddlebuggery.com/2012/01/the-first-five-days-on-
good...](http://cuddlebuggery.com/2012/01/the-first-five-days-on-goodreads/)

[http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-
topic/childrens/childr...](http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-
topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/50268-should-authors-and-
agents-weigh-in-on-citizen-reviews-.html)

------
pyre
Is it possible to sue all of those people for defamation? Even if they believe
that LendLink is a pirate site, they have a plethora of evidence to the
contrary. The law should punish them for attempting to destroy someone over
their refusal to either: 1) do 2 seconds of basic research or 2) accept the
truth that presents itself to them.

~~~
dangrossman
Not unless you can prove they were lying and acting in bad faith. It's not
illegal to defame someone based on a falsely held but reasonable belief.

~~~
jeltz
Unless they are in the UK. The libel laws in the UK are pretty crazy where you
need to prove that the statements are true.

~~~
josephlord
Strictly speaking I believe that if the defamation is published in the UK
(including available on the internet and one person in the UK reading it) then
the UK courts might still have a go even where neither the author or the
defamed are UK based.

It is however an expensive path to bring a case (and defend one) and damages
aren't always massive so it isn't really worthwhile unless you have money to
burn scaring people away from telling stories (true or not) about you.

