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 Water for Elephants, so we’re going to buy it. Clicking BUY will open a new window or tab at which point you can purchase the book from Amazon’s Kindle store. (Those of you who are not Patrons won’t see the BOOK IT button. Patrons can reserve a copy of any lendable book.)

STEP 2

Once you’ve purchased the book, returning to the book detail page from STEP 1 now allows you to click I BOUGHT IT to confirm with Lendle that you own a new and lendable copy of the book Water for Elephants. (If you forget to do this step, or if you already own the book, returning to the Water for Elephants book detail page at any time will give you the option of clicking I OWN IT.)

NOTE: Make sure you add the edition you actually own. This book, for example, comes in multiple editions and not all of them are lendable. If you own a copy that is not lending enabled, you will not be able to loan the book even if you add the lending enabled edition to Lendle.

STEP 3

You’re ready to lend. If you buy a book that has outstanding requests (lend requests that have not yet been fulfilled) you can lend immediately. Head over to the Your books tab: Any book you own which has been requested (and which you have not already lent out) will have a LEND IT button. (In this case, there are 60 outstanding lends for Water for Elephants.) Click LEND IT to get started.

If you own a lendable book that has no outstanding requests, you’ll get an email when a new request comes through. Lendle’s homepage also includes a dashboard with information about the books you own. Nevertheless, Your books is where you’ll want to go to initiate a lend.

(Those of you who are not Patrons won’t see the PLACE ON HOLD button. Patrons can hold a copy of any book for up to two weeks at a time. Having just bought this book, if I wanted some time to read it before seeing borrow requests, I could click PLACE ON HOLD to temporarily turn them off.)

STEP 4

Seriously. It’s important that you read all that. If you’re not interested in lending the book at this time — and that’s okay — click NOT NOW, THANKS. If you own this book but can’t lend it — perhaps you lent it to someone before you joined Lendle — click I DON’T HAVE IT AVAILABLE. If you’re willing to lend the book go ahead and click I’LL LEND IT.

STEP 5

Clicking LOAN THE BOOK will take you to amazon.com (in a new window or new tab) and the form for initiating a lend. We include the email address of the borrower on this step (the part that is blurred out, above) so that you can still initiate the lend if something goes wrong after clicking LOAN THE BOOK.

STEP 6

This is the amazon.com page you get to after clicking LOAN THE BOOK in the previous step. The borrower’s email address should be filled in for you. All you have to do is click Send now. You can fill in more of the form if you want, but it’s not really necessary.

STEP 7

This is a biggie. If you complete STEP 6, make sure to return to this window and click I’VE LENT IT! If anything went wrong after clicking LOAN THE BOOK in STEP 5, make sure to click I WAS UNABLE TO LEND IT. Doing so ensures that the user who was supposed to get the book does not eventually ding you with negative feedback and also ensures that you don’t lose your ability to lend the book later. If you don’t complete the lend AND you don’t click I WAS UNABLE TO LEND IT — we assume you did lend it until the borrower reports that he/she didn’t get it. As a consequence, that borrower has to wait longer than he/she should to get back into the queue and probably won’t be very happy!

STEP 8

If you follow all the previous steps, your copy of the book you’ve lent should now have the status of On lend on the Your books tab. It will remain On lend for 21 days, at which point it will automatically switch to Has been lent.

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