Today, I am going to revolutionize my industry.

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

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. 

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

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.

Our thoughts on Kindle library lending via OverDrive

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.)

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Amazon is “in talks” with publishers? We’ve heard that before.

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:

1. People who don’t read
2. Casual readers
3. 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.)

Update: Publishers, Amazon, and Lending

A few weeks ago, we mentioned that we’d reached out to two of our competitors — ebookfling and booklending — hoping to present something of a united front when approaching Amazon and publishers about ebooks and lending.

All of this, of course, is driven by our desire to spur innovation in the publishing industry as ebooks become more and more popular. First and foremost, the adoption of lending rights is progressing at a snail’s pace, at best, but even beyond lending there are a lot of opportunities for anyone willing to make some fairly obvious moves. 

With all that in mind, we thought it would be nice to drop an update, just to let everyone know that we’re still working behind the scenes to create a dialogue. At this stage, we’ve drafted letters that we’ll be sending to Amazon and various publishing houses.

Meanwhile, we’ve been in contact with ebookfling’s George Burke, who shares many of our goals. He’s agreed to work together, to the extent that we can, so we’re excited to have the ebookfling team on board.

We’ll update with any new information, as we get it.

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Lendle would like to borrow one of your books…

(See update below.)

Last week, we posted an article about books being deleted from Amazon’s system.

We’ve collected a few examples and, as you can see, the Amazon links for these books lead to “product not found” pages. 

Water for Elephants ASIN: B004PYDO64

Another (lendable) edition of this book is still available.

Veiled Freedom ASIN: B002IUZM1C

Another (lendable) edition of this book is still available. It’s free, though, so we won’t be surprised if it eventually suffers the same fate.

Fixing Freddie ASIN: B003YL4IGY

No edition of this book is currently available in Amazon’s Kindle store.

The issue, of course, is that these books don’t seem to be lendable, even though those who bought them paid for a lending-enabled edition. As far as we can tell, the first two have been replaced by newer editions, whereas Fixing Freddie isn’t even available as a Kindle book, at this point.

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Nabbing Free Books May be a Bad Idea

We’ve never really wanted to bargain hunt for our users, primarily because we don’t think it’s in our long-term interest to point out free titles, even when they’re lendable.

First of all, doing so arguably sends a bad message to authors, and we don’t want to do that.

We’re also now learning that snapping up free books may not be a particularly wise move, if the goal is to build up a catalogue of lendable titles, on the cheap. Despite this, we’ve definitely seen other services encourage readers to snag any and all free books because — even if they’re free today — they might not be tomorrow.

Makes sense, right? A free book today is a hot lendable commodity tomorrow — when it’s no longer free. 

Except, what if Amazon catches on and starts dumping all those free editions from their catalogue?

Due to the way lends are handled, if a book isn’t listed in Amazon’s system — even if it was lendable at the time of the “free” promotion — it will be impossible to ever lend that book. 

We’re starting to see evidence that this may, in fact, be happening. One Lendler let us know that five books, all obtained during free promotional periods, now lead to dead product pages. 

Not only is there a new edition (still lendable, fortunately) with a new price, the free edition has simply vanished.

W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe” is a great example. Try searching for it on Lendle.

Two results come up. Attempting to buy the first result leads to a dead page on Amazon. The second result works fine. Those who own the first book can no longer lend it, either through Lendle, or through any other means.

We have to wonder if Amazon is doing this in reaction to sites which are actively encouraging thousands of users to scoop up free books? We won’t be especially surprised if it turns out they’re attempting to close off this loophole.

Those promotions are there to bring a burst of exposure to an author. They’re not there so that people can stock up on lend credits in order to borrow books which actually do cost money.

We’re certainly not saying it’s wrong to grab free books when you see them; we just want you to be aware that it’s looking more and more likely that today’s bargain may not always be tomorrow’s lendable book. 

If you notice your free copy go dead, we humbly suggest buying a new edition. If you liked the book, and you want to lend it — why not reward the author with a purchase?

An open letter to Jeff Bezos

Hello, Mr. Bezos.

We’ve been building to this for some time now, but we thought it was high time that we introduce ourselves. We operate what we truly believe to be the most successful Kindle-centric social lending service: Lendle.

We hope we’re already on your radar.

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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:

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