
Amazon shuts down Lendle - steve918
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/21/lendle-amazon
======
aditya
This seems to be happening over and over again. Two years ago, everyone wanted
to be a platform, now all that embracing open API stuff has turned to shit.

Basically, the idea seems to be that once you've used your API ecosystem to
grow to a certain size, you can fuck over the developers that allowed you to
get to that point by building on top of your platform and by attracting users
to it or keeping them engaged. The only way to get around this is to become so
big that the platform can't shut you down (Zynga, Twitpic).

Twitter says, stop building clients, build in these verticals. Who is going to
stop them from going after the most profitable verticals tomorrow once
developers have proved that there's money to be made there? As a developer,
why the hell would I want to deal with this?

Open API's seem to be the antithesis of the profit motive, or atleast, that's
how it seems to be. Sad.

~~~
apievangelist
API ecosystem poaching is definitely uncool.

Twitters recent moves are disturbing and definitely will have a negative
impact on how people view APIs.

The bad decisions by Twitter doesn't mean everything is going to shit.

Amazon is building their ecosystem with consideration of their ecosystem
players - [http://www.cloudave.com/10992/aws-vpc-and-impact-on-
ecosyste...](http://www.cloudave.com/10992/aws-vpc-and-impact-on-ecosystem/)

NPR is retooling their APIs to support partner efforts, licensing, digital
rights, etc. - [http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2011/03/17/134259537/the-
npr...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2011/03/17/134259537/the-npr-api-an-
engine-rebuild)

This is some tough shit. No quick answers. Its different for different
industries, mediums, etc.

Some API owners are making poor decisions, but there are plenty others like
NPR, Amazon, and Netflix that are innovating and sharing their stories on
problems they face and what went into their decisions.

The key in any of this is don't get swept up in the short term undercurrents.
Step back and look at bigger pictures. I've been using APIs for 10 years.
Cloud computing for 5.

I feel like we are just getting going. Lots to figure out.

~~~
chc
If you read the headline, you will notice that this comment thread is about
_Amazon_ screwing over their API users. Twitter was just brought up for
context. So bringing up Amazon as somebody "innovating and sharing their
stories" without addressing how they treated Lendle users is more than a
little bit silly.

~~~
apievangelist
Actually...follow the tweet I used to get to this conversation.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2351900>

No reference of master conversation with Title you mention.

Silly?

I still would have posted Amazon link as reference to areas they do confer
with partners.

But you are correct I would have provided more discussion about Lendle users.

------
DanielBMarkham
It amazes me that the e-book providers think they can head down the same road
as the music industry and not end up in the same spot.

I'm a serious Kindle user -- I have dozens of books. I've thought about using
DRM-cracking software to free up my books, not because of any desire to share
or lend but just because it's not right having a book in my possession locked
away under a secret key some other bunch of people control.

This announcement doesn't bode well for Amazon. Technology can help you find
markets, technology can enable markets, but using technology to _force_ a
market to appear where none did before doesn't have such a great track record.
Everybody understands that you read a book, you share it (or give it away).
There is no further sale. Lendle was simply trying to help Amazon work in a
natural way that people commonly understand.

~~~
danilocampos
I crack the hell out of my Kindle purchases. Not for piracy, but so I can read
them on Apple's superior iBooks app. It's pretty simple to do. Funny part is,
I didn't start buying Amazon eBooks until I was certain I could defeat their
DRM.

The Kindle iPad app is anus.

~~~
jswinghammer
Why is it superior to the Kindle app?

~~~
danilocampos
When I tried it awhile ago, the Kindle app had a page turning experience that
can only be described as maddening. Tap in the wrong spot, boom, page has
turned. The iBooks app, for all its over-done skeuomorphism, makes interacting
with the book pretty easy. Simple things like page edges make clear what will
happen when you tap in a particular place. iBooks just feels really nice.

More than that, the Kindle app is just _ugly_. It has this janky animation
when you jump to another section of the book that's painful to watch. It's a
shame – the Kindle v3 hardware is a pretty badass product. The Kindle iPad app
feels barebones, insipid and unpolished. Does a disservice to the brand.

~~~
mryall
That's interesting. The initial feedback I read on iBooks vs Kindle back when
both apps were first available was very heavily skewed the other way: people
seemed to prefer the Kindle app.

Perhaps it was just a case of familiarity and the majority of the reports at
that time being by existing Kindle users. Apple has also pushed out a few good
updates since (including proper hyphenation!) so that has probably helped too.

------
mbrubeck
Time to trot out the Jeff Bezos quote again, from when authors were
complaining about Amazon allowing used book sales:

 _"When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that
book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone
understands this."_

<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1291>

~~~
mryall
It's pretty clear that he was talking about physical books. E-books that have
no limits on distribution are affected by different economic forces. In this
situation, what rights the purchaser has or should have are far less clear.

~~~
Dylanlacey
Stop mryall, he's being a rational adult!

I completely agree, the 'old' model doesn't apply 100% but I don't think that
publishers are trying for a new model that's fair. I can give thousands copies
for free, yes... But they can SELL thousands at almost no cost. So the whole
"You can't just GIVE it away" argument gets significantly weaker.

I think, however, that the end result will be to ignore the pirates. It makes
the most sense. People will always want to get their book "NOW", at launch,
from the store, not from hunting around for it.

------
mryall
It's a shame but they kind of had this coming. Amazon's book-lending feature
only really works with their business model as long it is just small groups of
people lending to each other. They were never going to stand for people
circumventing the whole model of individual payment by sharing books with
random strangers over the internet.

I'm not saying Amazon (and the whole e-book industry) is morally right in
restricting sharing like this, but you can't expect them not to stand up for
their own interests.

In the long term, I'm sure we'll end up with freely distributable e-books. But
that won't happen via Amazon's or Apple's online stores, which are quite
clearly on the side of restricting distribution in order to charge for it.

------
patio11
The Lendle team has their take on the matter here:

<http://lendle.me/amazon-api-revocation/>

Quote: _Our initial reaction was one of pure surprise._

Me, not so much:

 _Lending ebooks is a feature demanded mostly by people who don't pay money
for ebooks (and don't pay money for movies, music, or videogames if they can
possibly avoid it) and will not be induced to pay money by the feature._

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1821923>

The only use of the service is to turn one purchase of any popular book into
the ability to read as many as 26 books per year free. Its essentially the
classic music startup model: you don't want to pay money for music, we want to
make that happen. _Of course_ it got negative attention.

------
btucker
Amazon must be counting their blessings there wasn't a way for people to
borrow & lend physical books or else there's no way they could have built a
business around selling them!

~~~
awj
I didn't know there was a website where I could borrow and lend physical books
to random people across the world with the click of a button, absolutely no
shipping fees, and a rock-solid 14 day return policy.

Does that site exist, or are you exploiting the (obviously false) "ebooks are
books" train of thought for a pithy comment?

~~~
btucker
World-wide you might be right. But in the US for about the last 30 years you
can borrow any book you want 100% free straight from your computer (albeit
usually with a 2-3 day wait) thanks to the magic of inter-library loan.

------
bonaldi
Amazon's always played hardball with their API (see also Delicious Library
mobile). They're like the Oracle of the generally-cuddly API world, but at
least they've always been clear and upfront about it. Don't help them to sell
things? Bam.

By contrast, Twitter's now suffering as it tries to retro-fit a hard-ass
approach (though of course with a similar stance from the beginning it's hard
to see them getting where they are now).

------
davidw
They should do lending/selling via USB or wifi, that'd add some of the
'physical proximity' aspect back in, in that you couldn't lend to everyone all
over the internet, just people you live with or work with.

~~~
pavel_lishin
That sounds like it would be trivial to overcome with a little bit of hackery.

~~~
davidw
Determined hackers will probably find a way to outwit pretty much anything.
What they need to be doing is making it so that the path of least resistance
is the 'legal' one for the 95% of people who generally don't want to fiddle
with things.

------
jjcm
It's a shame that they did this. I think Neil Gaiman summarized the wonderful
benefits of using the web as a lending tool for books. He has a fantastic
interview clip regarding his outlooks on piracy of his books that you can view
here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI>

Here's the transcript, emphasis mine:

When the web started I used to get really grumpy with people, because they put
my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had
this A.) a belief, which was completely erronious, that if people put your
stuff up on the web and you didn't tell them to take it down you would lose
your copyright - which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very
grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And
then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of
which was [that] places where I was being pirated, particularly Russa where
people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the
world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through
being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a
new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies. I
thought this was facinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are
quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my
books and put it out for free. We took American Gods, a book that was still
selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free
on their website. You could read it, and download it. What happened was sales
of my books, through independant bookstores because that's all we were
measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent. I
started to realize that actually, you're not losing books. You're not losing
sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of
subjects and people say, "Well what about the sales that I'm losing through
having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?" I started
asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I'd
say, "Do you have a favorite author?" They'd say, "Yes." and I'd say, "Good.
What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being
lent a book, put up your hands." And then, "Anybody who discovered their
favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your
hands," and it's probably about five, ten percent. If that, of the people who
actually discovered their favorite author, who is the person who they buy
everything of. They buy the hardbacks and treasure the fact that they got this
author.

Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They
did not pay for it, and that's how they found their favorite author. I
thought, "You know, that's really all this is. It's people lending books. You
can't look on that as a loss of sale. It's not a lost sale, nobody who would
have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free."
_What you're actually doing is advertising. You're reaching more people,
raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idiea of the shape
of copyright and what the web was doing. The biggest thing the web is doing is
allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing
people to see things that they otherwise wouldn't have seen._ Basically that's
an incredibly good thing.

~~~
awj
So far as my personal experience can be extrapolated, it's not _just_
advertising. Sometimes it is lost sales. That said, so far as my personal
experience can be extrapolated, the lost sales are an almost insignificant
slice of the new sales.

~~~
forkrulassail
Well said.

------
delineal
The lesson in this is that building projects that depend on third-party data
is dangerous; there needs to be some sort of guarantee of access to the data
before you commit to the project. Building the project and then pointing
fingers at the data provider after your api access is revoked does nothing to
relieve the frustration of your users.

~~~
jschuur
Sometimes you just build a project because it's fun, you can and you're able
to launch it quickly. It's also an opportunity to pick up some skills and
experience and build up a reputation.

I don't think Lendle set out to be a long term, full time, paying gig.

~~~
delineal
I guess that's what I'm getting at... they weren't serious (enough) about it
and their users suffer the consequences. Nowhere on their website does it say
"beta" or "just for fun" or "this could go away at any time".

------
lancefisher
Maybe my judgement is clouded because I really like Amazon, but this seems
like something the publishers forced on Amazon.

------
JustinJM
Of the 30 or so books I have in my kindle only 1 was even lendable anyway.

~~~
mohsen
but still no excuse for Amazon

------
biot
I wonder if part of the reason is because the name "Lendle" is a little too
close to the "Kindle" trademark... similar to calling your app "Lendazon".

~~~
chwahoo
The reason is certainly that Amazon intended the lending feature to be used
between a person's small network of acquaintances. This means that the
likelihood of being able to borrow every book you want should be pretty low.
Lendle gamed this by expanding the set of people with which you share /
borrow. At that scale, the feature probably reduced Amazon's sales more
significantly than the intended usage.

------
raquo
Lesson: Don't get into conflict of interest with a monopoly that you rely on.
If you are strategically threatening or simply unprofitable for them, they
will kill you off.

------
VladRussian
if we go 2 levels down the stack, to me that situation with private APIs [more
precisely - "API services" ] provides a glimpse into the future what would
happen with Internet without net-neutrality (as the service of carrying your
network packets is just a "network API service" which owner of the service
would be able to decline/limit access to to anybody he feels like to).

------
jschuur
One thing to keep in mind here: The Kindle only let's you lend each book you
own once, mitigating the potential damage done. The site also prominently
featured the option to buy the book before and after the lend.

------
bhousel
Very interesting.. I've built something almost exactly the same as Lendle in
my spare time, but I haven't opened it up to a wider audience just yet.

I'm starting to wonder if it might be best to just keep it invite-only for
now.

------
svag
It is the first time that I hear about Lendle, and as I read from their site
it is a very interesting service. I think it is the online version of
<http://www.bookcrossing.com/> in a way. You are "leaving" your online book in
Lendle and everyone can pick it in order to read it.

I hope for a quick resolution of this matter.

------
forkrulassail
Very, very bad style. 2 weeks is mostly not enough time between work and life
to finish the thicker books. So one ends up buying loaned books you otherwise
wouldn't have considered.

This is a really stupid move and I implore others to make it known via the
Helpdesk.

------
jmspring
Call me naive...and quotes aside...This may be due to Amazon possibly wanting
to provide a similar service themselves? Possibly working in some sort of
fee/etc?

------
asciilifeform
The idea that one can "lend" a string of bits is nonsense:

<http://www.loper-os.org/?p=351>

