LendleBlog

We're putting Lendle up for sale.

Wed, 16 May 2012 17:24:55 -0400

We launched Lendle just over a year ago. Amazon had just begun to embrace digital lending and we knew we could build a great social experience for millions of Kindle owners.

We love being part of an industry on the move and taking on some of the tough issues surrounding ownership and digital content, but our primary goal has always been to create the best social-lending site we could build.

That has always meant a site that focuses on lending above all other considerations.

LENDLE

At its core, we’re a matchmaking service for Kindle owners. Our Lendlers list the books they’ve purchased, which in turn provides the foundation for our library of lendable content.

When someone requests a book, we make that request available to the Lendle community.

We’ve introduced several new features over the last year, but they’re all designed to drive and improve the core lending experience.

To date:

We have fulfilled over 70,000 loan requests.
Our community has added nearly 50,000 unique (lendable) titles.
All told, Lendle lists 330,000 books available to borrow.

We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve built, and we think Lendle has been an amazing success.

With all that said, we started out as a team of three, and we remain a team of three: We’ve not outsourced the design, the troubleshooting, or the customer service, and we’ve accomplished all of this without accepting a single penny of outside funding.

Lendle has always been a huge undertaking, and as our community has grown, so too have our responsibilities.

On top of all that, two of the three of us have full time jobs outside of running Lendle, and various other “living life” priorities that we would like to focus on.

We don’t want any of that to get in the way of the customer service we expect of ourselves, and we don’t want our additional workload to have an effect on potential new features or the overall Lendle experience, either.

With that in mind, we’re looking toward the idea of selling Lendle to someone (or a group of someones) who is interested in building upon our successes, and taking the community to the next level.

Such a sale would involve:

The Lendle brand, including all associated trademarks.
All associated code.
Day-to-day operations.

Lendle means a lot to us. We’ve put over a year of our lives into growing a great community and implementing new features and we’ve done our best to put a unique spin on social-lending to ensure that Lendle stands out amongst the competition.

Even so, there’s still a vast untapped market for social-lending that is millions of potential Lendlers strong, and we think a nimble and innovative home for Lendle can only lead to great things.

As competition in the ebook space heats up, we expect to see more and more acceptance of digital lending amongst publishers, authors, and retailers. Already, TOR Books — an imprint of publishing powerhouse Macmillan and one of the largest publishers of Science Fiction and Fantasy novels — has announced that it will drop all DRM from its collection in early July 2012.

In addition, Amazon is moving into publishing more and more, and we expect this to increase the lendable content available to Lendlers. Amazon’s publishing imprint, 47North, is stocked with excellent Science Fiction and Fantasy novels by well-respected authors like Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear — and it’s all lendable. Most recently, Amazon bought the publishing rights to the entire James Bond backlist.

The best is yet to come.

If you’re interested, or if you have questions, get in touch!

http://lendle.me/contact/

Site: Lendle

Today, I am going to revolutionize my industry.

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:30:00 -0500

Imagine what it must be like to be a prominent figure in the publishing industry, a person in a position of power, to be the guy or gal who could wake up and say:

“Today, I am going to revolutionize my industry.”

That person exists. It could be John Makinson. It could be Markus Dohle. Or Brian Murray.

J.K. Rowling is doing it, but she’s limiting her revolution to the Harry Potter industry.

At any rate, it doesn’t really matter who it is: People exist who are in a position to shake things up and turn the publishing industry on its head at a pivotal moment in time.

That, to me, is the dream.

It’s one thing to ride the resurgent wave of the mobile industry in the years after the introduction of the iPhone, or the computer industry after the iPad, but imagine what it must have been like to be Steve Jobs (or to have worked for him) once it had been decided that Apple was going to disrupt the mobile and computer industries?

No, seriously: If you’re reading this and you’re the head of a publishing house, please imagine what it would be like to make the decision to fundamentally alter the direction of your industry.

The foundation has been laid: The Kindle Fire, the iPad, the Nook Color — all of these devices are platforms for this revolution. Any one of the people I’ve listed above could approach Apple, or Amazon, and lay out a grand plan to win the day.

What happens if Brian Murray approaches Jeff Bezos, or Tim Cook (or both) and says:

Hey, Jeff. We’re nervous as hell about this, but if we don’t move, someone else will, and we’ve got some big ideas. We’d rather be bold and first than timid and last. The writing is on the wall regarding ebooks and we want to lead the charge. I know HarperCollins has been a bit behind the times and, yes, even downright stodgy when it comes to our embrace of digital content. That ends today.

Here’s what’s on the table: We’d like to bite the bullet and sell all our content DRM-free.

Go ahead and put a digital signature on it, but that’s all we’ll require.

Next, we want to work more closely with Amazon. We want you to build a social platform for our books and put it on every Kindle you sell. You’ve got the user data, we’ve got the books. Charge a monthly subscription and give us a 50% cut. Any user who joins that service can then share their books with other users of the service, as often as they like, with the idea that you’ll manage the transactions.

Amazon has a record of who buys what, which means we can even authenticate purchases and ensure that people aren’t lending the same book out to more than one person at a time. We can iron out the details later, but that’s the gist of it.

Give your customers a platform to talk about our books. Our goal, then, is to create an army of consumer marketers for our content.

Here’s where it gets interesting, Jeff. If a user wants to use this service to sell their copy of a book to someone else on the service — make that possible. They’ll get a small cut, you’ll get your small cut, and we’ll get our usual bigger cut. Go ahead and make the user’s cut a credit for the Kindle store, though. That way, they come back and buy more books. You’ve got some smart people at Amazon and I’m confident you can work out a way to transfer ownership to the new user. Above all else, make this easy and fun to use.

Then, if Jeff Bezos won’t play ball, or if he won’t agree to negotiate the price of ebooks in a direction more favorable to HarperCollins, Tim Cook gets the same pitch.

This isn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Both Amazon and Apple could make this happen, given the opportunity. An independent developer with sufficient funds could make it happen, for that matter.

If Amazon launches this tomorrow, HarperCollins benefits tomorrow by being first to market and first to a sensible solution for monetizing the redistribution of their content amongst customers.

At some point, seeing the error of their hesitant ways, other publishers would negotiate their way into the platform. Eventually, Apple decides they’ve got to create something similar for iOS and Barnes & Noble follows suit.

Sadly, the fact that something is possible doesn’t mean it’s likely. This can’t happen unless Brian Murray (or whoever) wakes up with a desire to flip the script.

I have to wonder, though: In a post-PC, post-paper world, if no one seems to be waking up with that grand vision — why are these people still leaders in their industry in the first place?

The Hunger Games: A dystopian future in which lending is no longer allowed

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:48:00 -0500

We’ve posted updates at the end of this post. We’re not entirely sure what’s going on with the lending status of The Hunger Games series, because it appears to be changing from minute to minute. This is where things stood when we first noticed the issue, earlier this morning:

I’ll cut straight to the chase: Amazon’s top holiday seller and Lendle’s top borrow request, The Hunger Games, is no longer lending-enabled on Amazon. Unfortunately, this means it must also appear as “not lendable” on Lendle. (It may take some time for the change to propagate.)

For whatever reason, the second book in the series, Catching Fire, is still lending-enabled.

The third book, Mockingjay, is not.

The collected trilogy seems to retain its status as lending-enabled.

If I had to guess, these changes signal the imminent release of a movie tie-in edition of The Hunger Games. We went through this same hassle when Water for Elephants moved through a series of Kindle editions.

We’ve never really seen a particularly good explanation as to why they have to revoke the lending rights of an existing edition to move in a new edition, but then, we never get much of an explanation about anything having to do with the changes to the books we buy.

My “new edition” theory doesn’t really explain why the first and third books have seen the change, while the second book has not. If the point of lending is to hook new readers on a series, why reserve the ability to lend for the second book in a series? If you’re going to pick and choose, why not at least choose the first book?

It’s especially frustrating to see the lending status (potentially) revoked on a book that Amazon recently touted as it’s top holiday seller. We believe that success was earned (in part) because of Scholastic’s forward thinking views on lending, not in spite of them.

If you have questions, we suggest you contact Scholastic.

I’ve reached out to both Amazon and Scholastic. If we hear anything, we’ll update this post.

Update: As I mention above, the status of this series seems to be in flux. As of right now, all books are listed as lending-enabled — except for Mockingjay. Here’s hoping that all of the titles revert back to lendable before the day is out. (We’re cautiously optimistic.)

Update 2: Scholastic responded to my email.

Thank you for contacting Scholastic Book Clubs. I am happy to respond to your inquiry if it is a permanent change that the Kindle version of “Hunger Games” and “Mockingjay” are no longer lending enable. [sic] I apologize for any inconvenience you have experienced. I confirmed that we don not [sic] offer eBooks on the Kindle and suggest that you contact Amazon. Again, I apologize for your disappointment.

Amazon lists Scholastic Press as the publisher for The Hunger Games. What am I missing, here? (The email I sent in was posted to a general contact form on the Scholastic website.)

Update 3: Amazon responded to my inquiry, but the response doesn’t actually address the issue, so I’m not going to bother posting their response.

The death of the serious reader

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:07:00 -0500

Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and Freedom:

For serious readers, Franzen said, “a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience”. “Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change,” he continued. “Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

SOURCE

The Serious Reader — much like the Serious Music Lover and the Cinephile — is dying.

It was Colonel Ebook, on the subway, with the Kindle.

Still…

One wonders if Franzen isn’t lamenting so much the loss of the “serious reader” as the loss of the status quo: Readers who don’t actually do much reading, but who save their money for those bestsellers (cough, Freedom, cough) which pique their interest two or three times a year, because a massive marketing campaign tells them it’s time to open up their wallet and splurge on the next big thing.

That’s the sort of “serious” market which will always favor the Jonathan Franzen’s of the world. It’s not particularly condusive to the breakout author, the self-published, the diamond in the rough, or, you know, the rebirth of an industry gasping for breath.

This is the point where I planned to make some sort of “why so serious” crack about Franzen’s luddite-like views on the emerging ebook industry, but the more I think about it, the more obvious the answer becomes.

I guess I’ll skip the rhetorical question.

Lending Rights (and Wrongs)

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:38:09 -0500

Given all the chatter surrounding the (now on indefinite hiatus) SOPA bill, I’ve been meaning to post something about lending rights and Kindle books. We’ve published on this topic before, but as library lending via OverDrive and Amazon’s Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL) — not to mention sites like Lendle — become more and more popular, we’re starting to see the discussion surrounding copyright bleed into Amazon’s forums.

The end user is finally seeing (and scrutinizing) the impact of DRM on their reading habits.

The discussion, sadly, feels pretty black or white: On the one hand, some people feel as though more books should be free, that the KOLL’s “one free book per month” (for Prime subscribers) isn’t good enough. The sentiment seems to be that publishers are being greedy: “I can read more than one book a month, so why can’t I borrow more than one?”

The other side of the coin is the argument that Amazon and publishers don’t owe anyone anything: If people want books, they should always be willing to pay for them — no matter the cost — and it’s little more than consumer greed to expect otherwise. “Free” isn’t in the publisher’s best interests, so why should they offer anything for free, let alone one book per month?

Here’s a pretty typical argument regarding the first view:

Publishers and retailers are pulling a similar switch with ebooks and hoping that nobody will notice. When you buy an ebook you don’t actually buy it the same way you buy a print book. You buy a license to read it on a certain device, or number of devices. Most of these licenses do not give readers the legal right to share their ebooks, even though people have shared print books for as long as they have existed. As a librarian it bothers me that this basic feature of print books might disappear entirely as more people read ebooks over print books. While I understand the concerns publishers have about ebook piracy, the use of DRM and the criminalizing of sharing goes to far (at the same time it is not very effective). They would never get away with trying to restrict the sharing of print books, yet somehow they have convinced readers they don’t have the right to share ebooks.

SOURCE

It’s a bit surprising to see this logic coming from a librarian. Whether you’re talking about an ebook, or a printed book, the license is pretty much the same, at least when it comes to sharing: You don’t own the content of the book you’re reading, even if you own the shell it’s printed/rendered on.

(Note that I’m limiting this analysis to the topic of sharing/lending. The right to resell used ebooks is a whole argument unto itself.)

It’s true that if you want to loan someone a printed book, you can simply hand them that book and, eventually, you either get it back, or you don’t. In any case, while the other person is reading the book, you’re not able to read it, because you don’t have it.

I like to think of this as a built-in form of rights management, inherent to the method of delivery. There’s an inconvenience factor that has, historically, obviated the need for strict oversight by the publishing industry.

The argument, then, is that there should be no DRM on Kindle books, because DRM restricts our “right” to share with others the books we’ve purchased. Moreover, it’s different than anything we’ve had to deal with before and, well, change sucks!

Two problems, here:

If you want to share a Kindle book with someone “like you’ve always shared your regular books” you can always hand that someone your Kindle. (And risk never seeing it again.) My wife (also a librarian) did just that when she loaned her Kindle to my mother-in-law last week.

I’ve yet to see someone explain why they can’t do this, just as they’ve always done, if they feel compelled to lend a Kindle book to someone they know.

In some ways, lending “the old fashioned way” with a Kindle is actually more open, because you can still read those books on a 2nd Kindle, or on an iPad, or on your computer.

More importantly, in this hypothetical, sharing a DRM-free digital file isn’t anything at all like lending someone a copy of a printed book: If I’ve got a digital file, and I “share” it with someone, I’ve still got my copy of that file. (Certainly, no one is arguing that they’d temporarily delete their own copy, in good faith?)

Meanwhile, my friend also has a copy of that file. Before long, his friend has a copy of that file. And then her friend has a copy of that file. As the original lender, nothing ever stopped me from reading my copy, nor do I risk losing my copy if my friend decides to keep his, and there’s no end to the chain.

The argument that we’ve always been able to lend our printed books as many times as we want, to whoever we want, simply doesn’t scale to digital books.

It’s easy to argue, I suppose, that this is the way it “should” be, but whether DRM exists or not, that sort of sharing isn’t legal. If all Kindle books went DRM-free tomorrow, that turn of events wouldn’t wipe out existing copyright law and you wouldn’t suddenly have the right to distribute copies of books to your friends, let alone to complete strangers.

Similarly, you can hand someone a printed book, but you can’t make a word-for-word copy of that book and give it away, or sell it. Copyright limits how we can distribute the books we buy, DRM or no.

Sans DRM, you’re not “sharing” or “lending” books — you’ve become part of a peer-to-peer distribution network, with almost no incentive for anyone to buy books.

I’d love to think that we live in a perfect world and we’d pay for all our books out of the goodness of our hearts, or maybe at the very least we’d eventually throw a few dollars toward one of our favorite authors (most likely an established name who doesn’t really need it) but let’s face it: This scenario wouldn’t be sustainable for authors below a certain threshold of popularity.

On a more personal level, the loss of DRM would also mean the loss of social sites like Lendle.

Again, DRM-free does not and would not mean “all bets are off” when it comes to copyright and sharing.

Without the inclusion of DRM on Kindle books, Lendle would be nothing more than a network for pirating ebooks, and we’d eventually suffer the same fate as the now defunct sharing site “Megaupload” if in fact we attempted to operate as a lending network in a DRM-free world.

DRM makes Lendle possible.

There’s an argument to be made that the current restrictions on ebooks go too far, or that they’re too restrictive, but it’s hard for me to envision a future in which social lending can exist without some level of restriction, at least.

It also seems absurd to ignore the obvious differences of scope between physical objects and their digital counterparts. I can’t realistically mass produce a printed copy of The Catcher in the Rye, after all.

With all that said, I can’t really agree with the argument that we should just accept whatever publishers feed us when it comes to what we can and can’t do with our digital content, either — and Lendle certainly rejects the idea that lending and/or “free” (as a promotion) is bad for publishers and authors.

The publishing industry is facing a crisis: There’s a new model crashing up against an old model, and too many are reluctant to let go of that old model. In a lot of cases, this is bolstered by the crowd that refuses to go digital because they “love the feel of a book in the hand, the crack of the spine, the smell of old paper…”

There’s a distinct whiff of hipster pride, there — and it’s a sentiment that is disastrous for the future of the industry.

I’m convinced that “old school” crowd doesn’t read and/or buy nearly as many books as those who bought-in to Kindle because it facilitates their passion for reading, and find that having access to hundreds of books on one easy-to-carry device means that they can read more than ever before.

Reading should be about “what” you’re reading, not “how” you’re reading it, and people who genuinely love to read seem to get that.

Some people love to read, and some people love the idea of loving to read.

The former is the Lendle community, summed up. We’re not going to say that no one joins Lendle to avoid paying for books, but by and large, our active community buys more than they borrow, and they probably buy far more in any given month than most buy in an entire year.

They signed up because they love to read and, in turn, they love that Lendle provides a fun method to discover new books and authors.

Maybe we need to rethink whether we want to identify as a “social lending” site and focus more on our strengths (and our real benefit to the publishing industry) which is that our users are, essentially, a community driven advertisement for the consumption of books.

We’re fostering a culture of reading, and that’s an endangered concept that every author and every publisher should gladly support.

Amazon is stat-happy these days, and what they’re saying has been nothing but good news for publishers who embrace lending: The Hunger Games allows for lending but it nevertheless topped Amazon’s holiday sales charts. Authors who participate in Amazon’s KDP Select (which includes a lending component) saw an average sales increase of 26%.

The mounting evidence is that lending leads to sales.

I’ve no doubt in my mind that “lending = good” is the mindset that publishers need to embrace, and soon, in order to seize the momentum of a rapidly changing business model. The fact of the matter is, those who sign up for Lendle are buying books, and they’re choosing to make the best of a limited license to share their love of books with others, when they could instead be spending time on sites like the Pirate Bay.

And, of course, they’re buying books despite the fact that lending licenses could be more consumer friendly, books (often) cost more than they’d like to spend, and in a down economy. Imagine what might happen if publishers were to go all in?

As always, consumers are looking for a convenient and fun way to do the right thing.

With millions of Kindle devices in the hands of consumers and the unfulfilled promise of a sanctioned and legal social environment, there’s billions of untapped dollars to be made from increased exposure alone, and the very best kind of advertising — enthusiastic and viral word of mouth from rabid fans — is waiting to be harnessed and focused in a positive direction.

The only buy-in is a little trust and forward thinking from some of our major publishers.

As always, if you support Lendle, please consider signing on as a Patron.

Lendle Year in Review 2011

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:19:00 -0500

It’s hard to believe, but it was around this time last year that I called Jeff to pitch the idea for a social site that would allow strangers to share their ebooks with one another.

Here’s an excerpt from an email I typed up after our initial call:

Carolyn came up with an idea that I think is pretty outstanding:

Nooks have had this feature for a long time, but Kindle just added the ability to “lend” a book to a person if they have a kindle account (kindle or any device with the kindle app) so long as you know their email address.

So, fleshing her idea out a bit, you sign up, input the books you have on your kindle and then people can search for, say, “the lovely bones” and see that 10 people have it available to lend. You then send a lend request and if someone accepts, they can lend to you as per Amazon’s guidelines. People can reject a request as well. Perhaps people could make their lists public or private and share with anyone or only friends.

It’s basically a public library for kindle and nook books mixed with a peer-to-peer network.

Obviously, we later decided to focus solely on the Kindle (a decision we’ve never regretted) and, unfortunately, The Lovely Bones wasn’t then, and still isn’t, a lendable title. We had really hoped to see more publisher support in 2011, but several remain on the fence.

The idea was so simple, so obvious, that my original pitch is pretty much what we’re offering today.

We quickly discovered that we wouldn’t be alone in the social lending space. In fact, the competition we faced on day one is more or less the same competition we face today. It’s tough to build a really good social lending site!

In spite of – or maybe because of – the competition, we’ve remained true to the lending site we want to offer, resting the urge to become too gimmicky.

We love stats, and we show off as many as we can: How many copies of a given book are available (if any), how long you’re likely to wait on a lend to come through, whether a book is lendable, or not, how much it would cost to purchase a book instead of waiting to borrow, and so on.

PHASE ONE

We first discussed the concept of a social lending site on January 15.
We settled on “Lendle” as a name on January 17. (It was not a universally loved choice.)
We announced that Lendle was “coming soon” on January 26.
Testing began on January 27.
Beta invites went out on February 2.
Lendle launched to the masses on February 12.

On March 21st, we faced a minor (cough, ahem) setback when Amazon revoked our API access. Less than two months in, we were forced to shut down.

Here’s what we had to say about it: Lendle Press Release

No one wants to get shut down, even for a day, but the media attention that followed the loss of our API access is really what put us on the map.

Some of the outlets that wrote about us:

Daring Fireball (No outlet, big or small, mainstream or not, comes anywhere close to the traffic we get from a DF link.)
Wired
The Next Web
CNET

We also saw mentions on Gizmodo, The Guardian, Business Insider, The Christian Science Monitor, MSNBC, Slate, Ars Technica, GigaOM and The New York Times.

Fortunately, everything worked out for the best and we were back up and running the following day. We lost one of our best (and most requested) features – RIP, beloved book sync tool – but we gained a lot of new Lendlers. Press outlets even started referring to lending and borrowing ebooks as lendling.

PHASE TWO

Over the next few months, we introduced several new features, including our first marquee feature: Patron accounts. A free Lendle account is pretty amazing. A $25 (one time) Patron account is an unbeatable deal.

Read the announcement here: New features and three major giveaways

We also added the Book My Spot feature (still one of a kind in book lending), achievements, and the ability to “thank” fellow Lendlers as borrows are fulfilled.

To top it all off, we gave away a Kindle and an iPad 2!

Towards the end of May, a few of our Lendlers were featured on a CBS local news affiliate in Philadelphia: City Center Book Club Goes High Tech

And, of course, we launched Lendle’s most unique feature: It Pays to Lend

Even as we were preparing to launch, Jeff and I were talking quite a lot about a pay to lend concept. We thought it would be really cool if we could somehow pay our Lendlers for lending books, but we couldn’t really afford to do so.

Once we were finally earning a bit of consistent revenue through our Patron sign ups and the limited advertising we feature, we realized we could finally make it happen.

Whether you’re talking about Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, social networks are nothing without the backbone of a community, and that’s doubly true for lending sites: If no one lends, no one can borrow, and we’re a bust.

Lending sites have to be, in many ways, a perfectly balanced ecosystem – unless, of course, you’re happy to be a lending site in which no one ever lends any books.

Fortunately, our community of Lendlers has always been really great about fulfilling lends as quickly as possible – sometimes too fast, judging by some of the emails we get – and we wanted to put some of our revenue towards rewarding that effort.

So, we hatched a plan to pay out credits for every lend, and then $10 Amazon gift cards as those credits accumulate. No one else offers anything at all like this, to this day, and we think that’s one of the reasons Lendle has been so successful.

PHASE THREE

We launched the newest version of Lendle – the one you see when you log in today – on December 14.

Read the announcement here: Everyone? Meet everyone else.

Not only did we completely redesign the site from the ground up, we introduced Book Clubs, the best way yet to interact with other Lendlers and talk about your favorite books and authors.

We’ve got a ton of features planned for your clubs, so the best social book lending site is only going to get better over the next few months.

We also dramatically improved the speed and reliability of our search feature. (It was a long time coming.)

It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come in only a year. Publishers haven’t embraced lending anywhere near as quickly as we’d hoped, and we’re still stuck as a US-only offering, but there are millions of Kindle owners who have yet to sign up with us and we’re happy to report that awareness is increasing at a rapid pace. Over the last several weeks we’ve seen easily six times our normal rate of traffic and the market is still wide open. Every new Lendler is another book you’ll be able to borrow, a new author to discover and obsess over.

Meanwhile, Amazon has broadened its lending scope by partnering with OverDrive to offer library lending and, more recently, by announcing the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. Lending has a long way to go, but the future is bright.

STATS

Total books catalogued: 397,481
Lendable: 50.9%
Loans to date: 50,500
Unique titles available to borrow: 19,615
Total copies available to borrow: 162,168
Gift cards paid out since June: Over $10,000
Most popularly requested book: The Hunger Games (2023 requests)
Amazon’s most purchased Kindle book of the holiday season: The Hunger Games
Accounts connected via Facebook: 47.7%
Accounts connected via Twitter: 10.5%
Lendler with most books: Spec (13173)
Lendler with most lends: Spec (593)

Here’s hoping everyone has a happy and fruitful 2012. We can’t wait to see what happens!

Everyone? Meet everyone else.

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:04:23 -0500

We went ahead and rolled out the new version of Lendle, last Thursday, and the response has been really positive, thus far. We wanted to provide a bit more detail about some of the new features, and some of what it still to come, and the thinking behind our redesign.

First and foremost, we hope everyone has noticed some speed improvements. Both the book lists (what we’re now calling carousels) and the timelines have been optimized to load faster, and with less lag. Timelines now start loading new content before you get to the end of the list, which should make for a more seamless scrolling experience. Search results should now be faster and much more accurate, as well.

Book covers are now bigger, and we’ve reintroduced Amazon’s editorial reviews. These are available by clicking on any book cover or by visiting any book detail page on Lendle. We’ve also made it easier to submit soundbites by featuring the form more prominently on book detail pages. (Don’t forget that adding soundbites is another way to earn extra borrow credits!)

BOOK CLUBS

The big new feature we’ve added is a Book Club implementation. As of right now, anyone can join an existing club, if it’s public, or request to join an existing club, if it’s private. New clubs can only be created by our Patrons. As they exist today, clubs are a great way to engage in discussions with other Lendlers. We realize that there’s a lot we can still do to make this feature even better, but we wanted to provide a playground and then add features that will fit the way you play.

There are some obvious additions coming: Moderation tools, a notification system, and the ability to associate specific books to clubs and discussions are all around the corner. And, of course, we’ve already taken note of some excellent suggestions that we’ll likely implement. One of the groups we started, Sci-Fi and Fantasy, has already pointed us in the direction of some great books that we’d not heard of and there are also clubs centered around Christian books, Erotica books, and Young Adult books, to name just a few.

Book Clubs will evolve over time, as more and more are added. For now, we just hope everyone enjoys our first giant leap into social territory.

MORE TO COME

We have a few other features that we’ll be launching that didn’t quite make it into the new version of Lendle, and we’ll be taking all of your suggestions into account for overall usability improvements.

WIN A KINDLE FIRE!

There’s still time to refer new Lendlers for a chance to win a Kindle Fire or a Kindle Touch 3G. Get your unique referral code and tweet it, shout it, text it, email it – however you want to get it out there – and both you and the person you refer will have a shot to win! There’s no limit on entries, so the more new Lendlers you refer, the better your shot of winning.

You’ve got until the end of the month to enter and you can see all the details and contest rules over on our FAQ.

PATRONS

Patrons remain our primary source of revenue. All the money we pay out via Amazon gift cards, the ability to keep the servers running, our giveaways – all of this is tied to the generosity of our Patrons. As more Lendlers sign up, we can afford to pay out more for lends, we can come up with new contests and, most importantly, Lendle is more likely to be around for the long haul.

We think Lendle is a great free service, unmatched by any of our competitors. We have a bigger selection of unique titles than Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (10,000 vs. our 14,000 – and Amazon’s newest service only allows for one lend a month!) and it’s often faster to get books through Lendle than it is via OverDrive and your local library. We also think that $25 for all of the great Patron features we offer – and all the new features you’ll automatically get as they are added in the future – is an amazing value.

Lendle was recently the subject of a comprehensive review by the team over at the Bookwi.se blog, and we doubt there’s a better endorsement of our Patron upgrade than this:

Is Patron worth it? Yes, for Book It: Patron level is worth it for one reason, the ability to ‘book’ and not ‘reserve’ books. Everything else is nice, but extra… The ability to ‘book it’ reserves you a place in line. And once you move to the front of the line, you have to option to get the book, or wait until you are ready to read it. I currently have over 100 books ‘booked’. Many of these books are books that no member now has ready to lend. But I am booking for the point when someone joins with that book. I am essentially treating these books as a future wish-list. If I have any interest, I book a place in line and make a decision to actually read the book later.

We agree: Book My Spot is worth $25, alone. We’ve also changed up the way we display advertisements, so it’s worth noting that, as a Patron, you’ll never see any ad, anywhere on the site. These are just two of several great Patron-only features…

Support Lendle: Click here to sign up today!

We sent this out with the Newsletter — your first full...

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:22:50 -0500

We sent this out with the Newsletter — your first full look at the new Lendle dashboard.

We’re so very close!

It's not in our DNA to give up or despair.

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:35:00 -0400

Startups can react to unforeseen obstacles in one of two ways:

Oh, S**T! How does this hurt us? or…
How does this help us?

Today, Amazon announced that Prime subscribers would be able to instantly borrow (with limitations) from a selection of new titles — even those on the NYT bestsellers list.

Pretty amazing.

Predictably, our inboxes are flooded with questions about how we’re reacting to the news.

First, this isn’t an unforeseen development. We’ve been hearing rumors for some time now that Amazon might do something like this and, frankly, even if we hadn’t heard rumors, we’ve known all along how lending can lead to sales, and we don’t think we’re any smarter than the folks at Amazon.

So, what’s our reaction?

We’re signing up for Amazon Prime. So should you.

More importantly, we immediately thought of several ways that this could make Lendle even better. Better for us, better for Amazon, and — most importantly — better for our Lendlers.

Fortunately, we’re built for this sort of situation. Everything we do, we do in house. That means any code we have to push out can happen relatively quickly.

We’re ready.

A month or so ago, we got in touch with Jeff Bezos, and we said:

What [we were] hoping to see, though, was news about lending rights. Specifically, any indication at all that there’s some sort of effort on Amazon’s part to convince publishers that lending can be a key component in driving ebook sales. You once said that the Barnes & Noble model was a joke — you were right — yet Amazon adopted that model for the Kindle. Since that time, publishers have been more likely to opt out than in. The big names are all but absent. The titles people want to read and share aren’t lending enabled.

Is lending still on the radar? (Specifically lending rights appended to the ebooks we purchase from Amazon. [We’re] aware that library lending via OverDrive is now a go.) Has Amazon given up on this front?

The answer we got was hopeful:

Thanks for writing about your desire to see more Kindle books eligible for lending. We know this is important to our customers, and we’ll continue to work with publishers directly and ask that they enable their content for lending on Kindle. I’ve also shared your comments with the Kindle team.

We responded with, in part:

While many of our competitors are billing themselves as ebook “rental” services — selling a service that Amazon gives away, essentially — we’ve gone to great lengths to build a service that compliments and strengthens your offering without undermining your credibility with publishers. We’ve no interest in selling access to a license you already give away; we love books, we think publishing is ripe for a sea change, and we set out to build a service that could help make the case for that change.

We can only do so much, though. Publishers need to be educated. My wife is a librarian — Lendle was her idea — so we know first hand what we’re up against. The publishing industry is protecting an old model. Change doesn’t come by sitting around and waiting for old models to die.

Recently, on Twitter, someone said that Amazon had already won — and the ever-cynical undercurrent was that this was somehow a bad thing, that Amazon was growing too large.

We disagree. We think Amazon is winning because they’re making smart moves, because they’re the best, because they’re looking out for their customers. Indeed, they’re not waiting for change, they’re moving forward with their own publishing imprints — lending enabled — and they’re using the money they make to offer innovative and forward-thinking new features.

We can relate. We’ve always said that this was about being part of an exciting new chapter in the publishing industry — the first new chapter in a long, long time.

The plot just thickened.

We think that one of the best things about being a reader, and we suspect most book lovers will agree, is spontaneous discovery. It’s finding “that book” on someone’s bookshelf and becoming obsessed with a whole new world in print.

That sort of love translates to sales, even if it didn’t start with one.

Lendle’s never been (primarily) about money — we just need it to survive. Still. If money were all we cared about, we’d not be giving away most of our profit in order to offer our Lendlers a way to earn Amazon gift cards by lending.

This is why our first thought wasn’t to dwell on how this could hurt us.

Instead, we realized that we offer something that Amazon does not: A growing community that is dedicated almost exclusively to spontaneous discovery.

With the new version of Lendle that is just around the corner, our community is going to become even stronger.

And, in the end, Amazon’s big announcement is all about a button.

Which means we just need that button.

We don’t know exactly what that means, yet. But you can bet we’re on top of it.

If you’re smart, you’re signing up for Amazon prime so that you’ll be ready just as soon as we are.

The future is bright.

Here’s another PEEEEEEEEEEEEK behind the curtain of the...

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:55:00 -0400

Here’s another PEEEEEEEEEEEEK behind the curtain of the Lendle redesign, featuring the return of a popular feature…

As promised, here’s a tease of the new site...

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:27:53 -0400

As promised, here’s a tease of the new site redesign.

Bigger. Better. Faster. Uh… Stronger?

Our work is never over.

Lendle is featured in the October issue of Self Magazine! Why...

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:36:54 -0400

Self Magazine (October Issue)

Self Magazine (Cover)

Lendle is featured in the October issue of Self Magazine! Why rent when you can earn?

(Interesting aside: The lead time on a blurb like this is months, not weeks. We talked about Lendle for almost 20 minutes, not including a follow-up. Still, gotta love the way they distilled that discussion into what you see here!)

We're giving away a Kindle Fire and a Kindle Touch 3G!

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:14:29 -0400

Everyone on the Lendle team is incredibly excited about the new Kindle lineup. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber sums up the appeal of the Kindle Touch perfectly: “Everything good about last year’s Kindle remains, everything bad about last year’s Kindle is gone.”

There’s a lot to say about the Kindle Fire, but we’ll leave it at this: For the first time ever, Lendlers will be able to use Lendle on an actual Kindle. We think that’s huge.

To mark the occasion, we’re going to give away 1 Kindle Fire ($199 value) and 1 Kindle Touch 3G ($189 value).

The rules are simple:

Every new user you refer WITH YOUR REFERRAL CODE counts as one entry. All existing referrals will count retroactively. All referrals until the day we end the contest will count.

In addition:

Every new user who signs up with a referral code is entered to win. All existing users who signed up with a referral code are retroactively entered to win.

Contest is open to Patrons and non-patrons. No purchase necessary. When the contest ends, we’ll pick two random entrants. First pick wins a Kindle Fire, second pick wins a Kindle Touch.

Expect full details for both giveaways in Monday’s newsletter and in an update to this post.

Meanwhile, what are you waiting for?

Start referring new Lendlers with your referral code!

This just in: Nook Color price reduced to $199. (Oh, and Amazon announced the Kindle Fire.)

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:35:11 -0400

Way back when we were all living in the same city, we headed out to our local Junior College to watch a live satellite feed of one of Steve Jobs’s first keynote presentations as CEO of Apple. (The one where Noah Wiley walked out on stage as Steve Jobs.)

This morning, we didn’t get to see a live satellite feed, but we did follow along with This is My Next’s liveblog of Amazon’s Kindle announcements, headed up by Jeff Bezos.

Early impressions:

The whole event was very, very Apple like. 1) Lead with impressive stats. 2) Show off the new products. 3) There is no step 3.
Barnes and Noble? OUCH. Our headline is a joke, but you can bet the Nook Color won’t be $250 for much longer.
Apple? On notice, but price seemed like the only factor that should cause any real concern for Tim Cook and Co.
There are now 4 Kindle models. That feels like 1 too many. (Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Touch 3G, Kindle Fire.)
$79 Kindle nixes the keyboard, but isn’t touch-able. Questionable choice. This is the model to nix.
$50 premium for 3G when Wi-Fi is ubiquitous seems a bit steep, even for a lifetime of 3G connectivity. Seems a safe bet to say the Wi-Fi-only model will be the bigger seller by a wide margin.
The “Silk” web browser was talked-up and hyped almost as though Bezos considers it to be the Kindle Fire’s killer app.
Probably because, as reports had suggested, there is no built-in email app.
There wasn’t a lot of talk about reading on the Kindle Fire.
Developers?
Publishers?
Authors?
Would have been nice to see any of the above on stage.
We saw apps, but we didn’t see the underlying OS. That’s sort of a big deal.
Bezos knocked the idea of syncing, but people like the comfort of having a local backup. Cloud-only seems premature.

Of course, all of these thoughts come with the caveat that live blogs are often hard to decipher, and light on detail. We may have missed some of the nuance.

Our thoughts on Kindle library lending via OverDrive

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:40:00 -0400

After an incredibly brief (1 day!) beta period, it looks as though library lending for the Kindle is now live in 11,000 libraries across the nation.

Sorry, other countries. You lose again.

Read Amazon’s press release here.

We’ve not really had a chance to try this out, yet, so we can’t say whether the experience is good, great, or awful. We suspect your mileage may vary, depending on your local library’s specific OverDrive implementation. (Let us know your experiences.)

Not that we haven’t tried: Our library card pin number doesn’t seem to be working (and by “not working” we mean: “we forget what it is…”) so we weren’t able to sign in and check the availability of any books.

We were able to do some basic searching, but that was it:

This is what we found.

Looking that page over, we’re still not quite sure that Kindle compatible ebooks are available in our neck of the woods. We say we’re “not quite sure” because once you search for a book, the results are a bit daunting. There are a lot of format options but it’s not immediately obvious which work with the Kindle and which do not.

(Mobipocket?)

On a more basic level, it took us a while to find the library lending section and figure out what we needed to do to get set up. We were half-expecting some sort of “welcome Kindlers!” link, but…no such luck.

UPDATE:

Looks like our libraries won’t be offering OverDrive lending at all, come December. Licensing negotiations fell through:

The proposed new contract included:

substantial subscription charges to individual libraries in the consortium;

a 700% increase from 2010 to 2013 for the Digital Library Reserve Server Application Service (platform) fee; and

removal of language (11.4) that acknowledged consortium ownership of material. Removal of this language also eliminated the opportunity to transfer the materials (purchased by the consortium) to a different vendor.

The State Library was unable to negotiate favorable terms with Overdrive and so the State Library began to look for other options through which we might deliver audio and ebook content toKansaspatrons. On August 5, SLK received “notice of nonrenewal” from Overdrive. The statewide contract will end Dec. 5, 2011.

What we do know:

The content selection seems to be quite a bit more expansive than what you’ll find in the “lending-enabled” section of amazon.com. (If such a section existed.)

Without a doubt, our biggest obstacle is what it has always been: Some of the best, most popular books simply aren’t lending-enabled, because publishers are dragging their heels and Amazon doesn’t seem to be trying very hard to convince them to get moving.

On the other hand, there’s no guarantee that library lending will result in an instant borrow: If a library has 5 copies of a book, and those 5 copies are checked out, the sixth requester has to wait. Furthermore, unless that library eventually buys more copies, 5 is all they’ll ever have.

In many cases, we fully expect that you’ll get books faster by requesting them via Lendle, because we’ve accumulated hundreds of available copies of some titles.

Most importantly — for us, anyway — your local library is what it is: A vital resource for communities when it comes to access to books. (Libraries provide so much more than access to books, but for the sake of this argument we’ll leave it at that.) Without libraries, a lot of parents would have to choose between feeding their kids, and reading with them.

As we’ve said, the very idea for Lendle sprung from a librarian, and we’re rooting for library lending to succeed, even at the expense of our service. Libraries are that important. We’re not sure that the current model (OverDrive acting as a middle man) is the right one, but it’s certainly better than nothing.

Of course, we’ve no reason to believe that library lending and Lendle can’t co-exist. We think we can differentiate our service by offering something that libraries don’t seem to offer or aren’t designed to offer — especially online — which is a social sharing experience.

This is something we’ve been moving towards, and we truly believe we already offer way more than anyone else when it comes to connecting our Lendlers with other readers in the lending sphere. Looking to the future, we’ve got some ideas brewing that will make these connections even stronger.

The best is yet to come!

As always:

Support Lendle: Become a Patron!

(Be sure to support your local library, too.)

Refer friends and earn borrow requests!

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:17:04 -0400

We’re launching a brand new feature today: Referral codes!

As of about 10 minutes ago, every Lendle user now has a unique referral code. Find out what your code is by clicking the Find friends link or by visiting your account page.

Tweet it, update your Facebook status with it, email it, get a tattoo of it, shave it into your head — do whatever you like with it — and when someone signs up for Lendle using your referral code, you’ll earn two borrow requests.

New users have seven days to enter a code (the option to do so is located on that user’s account page) so if someone you’ve referred forgets, they have plenty of time to get your referral in.

Even better, if someone signs up using your code, you’ll automatically follow each other.

There’s no limit on how many people you can refer, so get busy, help us grow Lendle, and we’ll help you read the books you love!

This is a bit of a personal milestone, for us, but we thought...

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:02:22 -0400

This is a bit of a personal milestone, for us, but we thought we’d share the news: The United States Patent and Trademark Office has approved our trademark application. We received the official word (and documentation) this morning. It’s been a long process (started months ago) but we think we’ve hit on something unique, we think we do ebook lending better than anyone else, and so we think it’s worth it to be as official as possible.

Amazon is "in talks" with publishers? We've heard that before.

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:44:00 -0400

In other news, Google is “in talks” with the music industry. Anyone here buying songs from a music service powered by Google? Yeah. We’re not either.

At any rate, we were asked if we’d seen the recent Wall Street Journal news report that Amazon is currently negotiating a “Netflix-like” subscription service for books. We hadn’t, but now that we have, we’re not going to lose any sleep over it.

First, we’re hearing that these talks aren’t very far along — this isn’t something that is likely to launch soon, and certainly not alongside Amazon’s impending Kindle tablet.

The paucity of detail in the WSJ piece — paywall ahead — makes this feel like a coordinated leak, a bargaining tool meant to kickstart a discussion rather than finalize one.

What little we kinda sorta know:

The service would likely be tied to Amazon Prime, which currently runs $79 a year.
“Older titles.”
There may be a per-month limit on the number of books a given user could read.
Amazon is promising publishers a “substantial” cut of the $79 fee.

Amazon’s pitch is likely this: “We’ll give you a cut of every Amazon Prime membership, even when people don’t ever download a single book under our subscription plan. This way, even assuming some people use our service rather than buying books, you’ll still come out ahead.”

In other words:

“You won’t really be selling books, anymore, you’ll be an add on incentive for one of our services.”

Which leads us to this:

It’s unclear how much traction the proposal has, the people said. Several publishing executives said they aren’t enthusiastic about the idea because they believe it could lower the value of books and because it could strain their relationships with other retailers that sell their books, they said.

There’s nothing new or surprising about publishers expressing public skepticism about new and innovative business models — check Lendle’s library for evidence of that — but the skepticism is understandable in this case, because it’s definitely unclear how well a “Netflix-like” model will translate to books.

Why?

Reading isn’t quite like listening to music or watching movies — and our gut tells us that purchasing habits are different, as well. Let’s assume that there are three categories of readers:

People who don’t read
Casual readers
People who read obsessively

Now, let’s assume a model, based on what we know:

“User pays $79 for the ability to read 5 books a month from a limited back-catalogue of titles.”

Those in category A don’t read, so they’re simply not interested.

Those in category B probably don’t read enough to get anything out of the service, and what they do read (new, bestsellers) most likely won’t be included anyway.

Those in category C read dozens of books in a month, in which case they’re suddenly paying a subscription fee for a mere five books a month and then a la carte for anything above and beyond those five. Sounds like a great deal.

What does all this mean for Lendle?

It’s hard to say, really. Optimistically, Amazon offering any service that doesn’t directly compete with Lendle is good news. Pessimistically, Amazon could eventually decide that lending isn’t going anywhere — and ditch it altogether in favor of a subscription model.

If we had a say, $79 (or whatever they raise the price to) would involve everything described above, but Amazon would also work to convince publishers that it also buys lending rights — as they exist today — for all titles, even newer titles, when bought a la carte.

Doing so would provide a value-based incentive for customers to continue to buy books alongside the ability to stream them, which would go a long way toward placating an industry that doesn’t want to lose the ability to sell an actual product.

(Frankly, we wish Amazon would put some negotiating muscle behind their existing lending service — which is still half-baked — before they start talking about new services. It’s all very wishy-washy.)

Ch..ch..ch..changes!

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:27:35 -0400

In our most recent newsletter, we announced that we’d be making changes to our “it pays to lend” program in the “near future” — when what we should have said was that it would be available within 24 hours: Variable pricing is now live! (We didn’t actually expect to be able to launch it this soon.)

For those who missed the newsletter, here’s what we had to say about the new system:

Our “it pays to lend” program has been successful beyond anything we would have ever expected. We love that we’ve discovered a way to reward our Lendlers for their willingness to share their books with other members of the Lendle community. Still, we’ve learned a lot over the last couple months, and we think there’s room for improvement.

One of our main goals has always been to provide an increased incentive to spur lending. At the same time, not all books are created equal. Often, users who buy the least expensive books are earning the most for their lends. In fact, if a book is only $0.99 – we’ve been paying some of our Lendlers $1.00 to lend that book. On the flip side, someone who lends a more expensive book, even one with more demand, earns the same amount, even though their budget and interests may not allow them to lend as many books.

To address this disparity, we’ve come up with an algorithm that will take several factors into account to assign a lend value to every book. That value will be updated continuously, as various factors change. For example, the price or demand could go up or down on a given book, at which point the lend rate for that book will adjust accordingly. We’ve spent a lot of time creating an algorithm that will ensure consistency, and we hope to roll this new system out in the near future.

Any unpaid credit earned prior to the switch will pay out at the existing rates. Under the new system, Patrons will still earn double for every lend. Some books will actually be worth more under variable pricing (for both Patron and non-Patron accounts) than they are under the $0.50 and $1.00 system.

Looking ahead, we have some really exciting ideas about how Lendlers will be able to spend the money they earn and we’ll be folding variable pricing into a host of new features.

It’s always nice to see a little hometown love! Read the...

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:34:39 -0400

It’s always nice to see a little hometown love! Read the article here.