May 2011
13 posts
3 tags
Ever get the feeling you're being followed?
Last week we rolled out a new social feature: Followers.
We wanted to write something up to let everyone know what it is, and what it isn’t.
We’ll start with the latter:
We see a lot of requests for a feature that would allow one person to lend specifically to another person. “Person A is my friend, so I want my only lend to go to Person A rather than to a stranger.”
We...
5 tags
Lendlers featured on CBS3 in Philly! →
…unless your friends have extensive e-libraries, your choices are limited. That’s why these women were happy to try Lendle.
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Guide: How to lend a book
From time to time, we see an email from someone who is stymied by the lend process. We’ve done everything we can to make lending as easy as possible on Lendle, but there are some steps that you must take to ensure that a lend is completed, so we thought we’d take some screenshots of the entire process:
STEP 1
This is the book detail page for Water for Elephants. We don’t own...
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An open letter to Neil Gaiman
UPDATE: Neil’s response answers (via twitter) added in.
A little over two weeks ago, we sent this same (or, mostly the same) series of questions to Cat Mihos, as per the neilgaiman.com FAQ. We know Mr. Gaiman is incredibly busy and that responding to an interview request from a website he’s probably never heard of isn’t at the top — or even the bottom — of his list...
4 tags
Vivek Haldar: Stallman's Dystopia →
vivekhaldar:
I was a year into college when flipping through the latest CACM in the library I came across Richard Stallman’s dystopian view of the future:
…if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read…
Via @adamjspooner
7 tags
Looking for lendable books? Good news!
Sometimes our focus on lending restrictions can seem a bit glass half empty, so we thought we’d end the work week on a glass half full post.
We were recently involved in a discussion in which it was posited that perhaps Amazon was responsible for the dearth of lendable titles in the Kindle store and, lacking evidence, we simply said we didn’t know.
There is some evidence, though,...
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The Business Rusch: Surviving The Transition (Part... →
This is a really interesting article on the publishing industry. Something we’re still not sure about, though: Who’s scared, and who’s ready to move forward? Amazon? Publishers? Authors?
We’ve seen the finger pointed in all three directions, and it sure would be nice to see some of this start to clear up, sooner rather than later.
5 tags
Improved Twitter and Facebook Integration
We’ve provided options for signing up / signing in via Twitter and Facebook for some time now, but we’re now expanding on that to make things a bit easier and also to extend some of our social features to your Twitter feeds.
When viewing your account settings, you’ll now see a SOCIAL NETWORKS tab:
You can choose to connect Lendle to both Facebook and Twitter. Connecting to...
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Sound off in 100 characters or less...
Last week, we rolled out a new review feature and, in typical Lendle fashion, our version of reviews comes with a twist.
All book detail pages now include a SOUND OFF tab. Soundbites (reviews) can be up to 100 characters and are posted to book timelines. We’ll also feature a handful of random soundbites on the SOUND OFF tab so that everyone has an equal shot at visibility.
My soundbite...
6 tags
An Open Letter to Sara Lloyd at Pan MacMillan
Hi, Sara.
Lendle here. We’re a web-app devoted to creating a culture of reading around the ability to lend and borrow Kindle books. Maybe you’ve heard of us?
You might be interested to know that thousands and thousands of Lendlers are super excited to purchase books (including books from MacMillan) in order to read them, yes, but also to share the experience with others who will, in...
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What could we be doing better?
It’s easy enough to pat ourselves on the back and feel as though we’re offering a great lending experience. (Cough. We do, in fact, think that. Ahem.)
We also have a pretty good idea about areas in which we need to constantly improve: Speed (both in borrowing and in overall site performance) and in growing our user-base and catalog.
What we don’t know, necessarily, is what...
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Are publishers now opting out of ebook lending?
One of the reasons we’ve been so keen on tracking statistics surrounding the number of lendable books in our catalogue is that it means we’re harvesting information about an industry in its formative stages. Almost no one else has this information — and if they do, they’re not sharing it.
One of our most prominently featured stats is “available titles”. As...
8 tags
New Features and three major giveaways
We’ve been teasing a new feature launch for a couple weeks now, and it’s finally time to pull back the curtain. This is by far the biggest series of changes that we’ve made since Lendle’s launch and we couldn’t be more excited.
Last week, we made some aesthetic improvements to your activity feeds. First and foremost, we think the new layout looks nicer, but many of...
