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).
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.
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).
I can't imagine that Amazon being afraid of anything is the limiting factor here, but rather book publishers being afraid. Amazon has sold DRM free mp3's for years now so it's not like they have some sort of pervasive fear of people sharing things they bought from Amazon...
Furthermore, some books are loanable and others are not. It's definitely a publisher thing.
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.
> 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.
I checked my Kindle collection a few weeks ago (on the initial lending post here on HN) and today. More of my books are lendable today than before.
Apparently, Amazon is erring/defaulting to benefit the publishers. That is, books are NOT lendable by default. The publisher, more than likely, has to update Amazon to make the book lendable.
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.
I was thinking of the first news post about lending being possible on the kindle, where there was a small thread on the possibility of building a _market_ for lending, but I don't have the relevant url at hand.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
"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?
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.
At least in the US (I'm Canadian, FWIW), it's explicitly legal to lend dead-tree books under the First Sale Doctrine[1].
The reason that this doesn't work for ebooks is that, unlike a physical book, you're only buying a license to use it (i.e. the same limitation you get on software).
I personally see this as a huge step backwards, and for that reason alone I'll be buying hard copy books for the foreseeable future. I'd love to have a Kindle or another eReader, but I just can't abide the limitations.
Of course it is outrageous, but once again the publishers are simply repeating the playbook that has served the music and movie industries so well: treat your customers like thieves, wait a few years, harvest a nice crop of actual thieves.
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).