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.

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.)