April 2011
9 posts
7 tags
Sampling, in addition to lending?
We’ve written pretty extensively about Amazon’s current lending model, but there’s an interesting conversation unfolding on Twitter which centers around whether the industry is too focused on an outdated model.
Mike Davidson prompted the discussion:
The whole concept of lending electronic books seems totally unnatural to me, in its current form.
That form being: Someone...
6 tags
Amazon's OverDrive Announcement
Kindle owners rejoice! Amazon has announced that “later this year” they’ll be working with OverDrive to provide library lending to Kindle owners:
Amazon is working with OverDrive, the leading provider of digital content solutions for over 11,000 public and educational libraries in the United States, to bring a seamless library borrowing experience to Kindle customers. “We...
2 tags
2 tags
5 tags
New feature: Average wait for lend
Over the weekend, in keeping with our goal of being as transparent as possible with our numbers, we went ahead and added another statistic to the book detail pages: Average wait for lend.
That is, how long is it going to take for a Lendler to get a particular book, once it has been requested? These are the numbers that we care about, and that we suspect our users care about.
Of course, we could...
3 tags
Borrow Requests: Behind the Scenes
Ever wonder what really happens when you click the “borrow” button? That one little click fires off a sequence of several events, all of which are ultimately designed to get you your book as quickly as possible.
When you initiate a borrow request, the first thing we do is check to see if the you are allowed to borrow books or not. You must have a borrow request remaining to be used,...
3 tags
Lendle by the Numbers
Here at Lendle, we love stats. We’ve learned a lot just by looking at the numbers, and one of our earliest goals was to provide information to our users that would convey useful and honest information about our site and the books that have been made available.
For instance, we make a point to tell our users that we only have one copy of a book if we only have one copy. We also tell users...
4 tags
Harry Potter, Unfashionably Late to the Party →
The topic of this article doesn’t really have anything to do with lending (at least not yet) but the hint that Harry Potter “might” be coming soon to an e-reader near you is making waves in the news, today.
Some of what is being said in the article warrants derision comment:
And publishing industry experts said they will transform the electronic market and easily net the...
7 tags
April showers bring new features!
We’ve been introducing new features faster than we can blog them, so here’s a rundown of what’s changed over the last several days:
Search
We’ve implemented a blazing fast search engine. Book searches should be noticeably faster.
We’ve also added the ability to refine searches by excluding terms, applying tags, etc:
...
