An open letter to our international friends

Hey there. It’s not you, it’s us. We swear! Well, wait. It’s not really us, either. There’s someone else that’s kind of coming between us. We hate it too! It’s just, well, that other person is kind of important.

Seriously, though, a tweet this morning made us realize that we’ve never really gone into detail about the international situation we’re all facing:

Sad that Lendle.com only works with US Kindle users but glad to find out there is an option for everyone else …

Our stock answer to this is always that we agree, it sucks, and we’ll open up just as soon as Amazon does. Blah blah blah.

All of that is true, of course, but there really is a bit more to it. Most importantly, there’s never going to be a fully-featured lending option for anyone outside the US until Amazon works out whatever issues they’re having with licensing a lending program with non-US publishers. Lendle can’t do it, and neither can anyone else.

The question, of course, is why don’t we work with what we have? Non-US Kindle users are able to borrow books, they just can’t lend books. What’s wrong with that?

There are two answers to that question, and either one would be reason enough for us to want to wait:

• We’ve said from the very beginning that we don’t want to be seen as a destination for free books. We require our Lendlers to lend and borrow, because it’s the only way we can be sure that everyone is buying books. Arguments about the price of ebooks aside, we believe authors work very hard and that they should be compensated for their work. 
• Let’s say we were to open up borrowing to non US Lendlers. Perhaps that would bring in another 10,000 - 20,000 users. That’s great for us, right? From the perspective that we’d have thousands of new users, it would be, yes. On the other hand, thousands of new users would have no way to lend a book, even if they wanted to. We’d see tens of thousands of new borrow requests and we wouldn’t be able to balance it out with even a single new lend. As it stands, non-US Kindle owners are understandably frustrated that they can’t join Lendle. The alternative is that every US Lendler and all our new non-US Lendlers would be super frustrated that their lend requests are never fulfilled. Right now, one of our biggest problems is that many of our lends happen TOO fast. We never want to have the problem we know we’d face if we opened up before Amazon does. It’s not a trade off we’re willing to make. 

That’s not to say that we’re not frustrated. We really will do everything we can to open up just as soon as it’s feasible, and when that happens everything that is currently great about Lendle will be great for everyone, with no trade-offs. We wish we could say it’ll be tomorrow, or even this year, but we honestly don’t know.

We know not everyone will want to wait, and it’d be silly for us to expect otherwise. 

We just wanted to let you know that the only current alternative is a less useful Lendle that would make everyone unhappy — the timing just isn’t right.

(We hope we can still be friends.)