
The problem with Amazon's Kindle Owners' Lending Library - Garbage
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/11/amazon-kindle-lending-library-publishers-authors.html
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robterrell
Hmmm... he says that Amazon doesn't pay publishers enough for the lending
library. How much does my local library pay publishers for the same dead-tree
book? Cover price, right? And nothing for each reader? Actually, they probably
pay the volume discount price, not even cover price.

I like to see him argue this from the ground up. Start with the local-library
model: why should Amazon pay _anything_ for book lending? Aside from the fact
that technology has made it possible?

As I recall from the three books I wrote, authors don't get crap from
discount, book club, or library sales.

Is the publisher is trying to make a little extra margin for itself, by
demanding a fee for loaned books? Will a standard author's contract now
include an author's cut of these lending fees?

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luser001
Technology, economics, and society don't develop independent of each other.
Due to physical distribution constraints, there were artificial limits on how
widely a single book copy could be distributed. Hence, simplest system that
compensated all parties appropriately, was the the policy of a fixed fee to
individual buyer and library (the "first sale doctrine" may also apply here).

Now, with the Internet allowing practically infinite lending, should the
policy be different? Probably.

Think about it the dual of your though experiment: if lending libraries were
invented in a world with effortless, almost-infinite lending among a
25-million-or-so "library", don't you think per-usage charges would be an
automatic feature?

Btw,AFAIK DVD rentals work this way: Netflix can't rent out more than 100
times or so before paying for a new copy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

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jellicle
> Now, with the Internet allowing practically infinite lending, should the
> policy be different? Probably.

Well sure. The question is whether something that has no inherent cost
(electronic duplication) should have an artificial cost imposed on it for no
apparent reason. The answer is clearly no.

> Btw,AFAIK DVD rentals work this way: Netflix can't rent out more than 100
> times or so before paying for a new copy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Any DVD purchaser can lend them, just as any book purchaser can lend them.
This has been litigated.

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rprasad
>Any DVD purchaser can lend them, just as any book purchaser can lend them.
This has been litigated.

He means that the DVD wears out after 100 or so views, so Netflix must buy a
new one. In other words, the DVD is not an infinite good.

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larsberg
I was hoping he was pointing out the painful thing about it from the user side
--- you have to use the Kindle itself to borrow a title, which (at least on
their e-ink readers) requires a level of patience I don't possess. Browsing
through hundreds of pages of titles with a second of refresh between each
brings back unpleasant memories of 9600 baud modems and scrolling through BBS
file listings.

I really hope they add the Borrow button to the website.

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jhawk28
Publishers love variable fee rates. Consumers prefer flat fee rates. Such is
life. I don't understand why they are not looking at the renting as
advertisement. It would be interesting to see if sales go up as a result of
the borrowing. The other problem is that there really is not very many books
available (5,000 sounds like a lot, but if you can't find anything...). The
last problem is that it is at most one book a month. I can read a substantial
book in 3 days.

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gigamonkey
Of course in this case Amazon is in the middle, right? Suppose publishers
demand to be paid by usage. Amazon can still charge their customers a flat fee
--it just moves the risk of mis-setting the flat fee onto Amazon rather than
the publishers.

Also, consider the incentives that a flat fee system sets up for publishers
and writers: if you get paid per title rather than per reader, you're
motivated to flood the market with books not to try to write a few really good
books that lots of folks want to read.

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alttag
Your second point is key: the fixed fee plans compensate poor writers as much
as excellent ones. With that argument, I think publishers could sell a
variable fee.

Maybe there's a slightly more middle ground--pay based on the number of peak
_simultaneous_ borrows in a period. Just as a library would have to pay for
each physical copy lent, is it too Luddite to suggest Amazon do something
similar? Not pay for each borrow, but based on the peak simultaneous borrows?

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rdl
If I were an author or publisher, I'd try the drug dealer model -- give away
($2.99 Kindle price, or participation in Lending Library) the first book or
two in a series, or the first non-fiction book on a related set of topics --
with the remainder being $9.99 or higher.

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johnnyo
Here's a simple suggestion. Carve out a portion of the Prime fee for book
borrowing, say $12/year. Since you can rent 1/book per month, each publisher
gets $1/month per borrow. Someone takes six months to read your book, you get
$6. 1000 people check out your book this month, you get $1000.

The price is just an example, but it seems a reasonable compromise. Fixed fee
for the customers, variable fees for the authors.

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naner
_"For the vast majority of titles, Amazon has reached agreement with
publishers to include titles for a fixed fee." So no matter how popular (or
unpopular) the publisher's titles are, they get one flat fee for participation
in the library._

What makes you think that is an Amazon stipulation? Maybe publishers wanted
the flat fee.

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WalterBright
As a Kindle Direct Publisher myself, my problem with the Lending Library is
they have excluded KDP books from it. I _want_ my books in the Lending
Library!

