Borders.

We dropped by a Borders this weekend. Everything! Must! Go! It’s early, so the best deals are yet to come — most likely on the worst merchandise. It was nice to see a bookstore teeming with eager customers; it’s just too bad that it takes a liquidation sale for that to happen.

Not long after Borders announced their farewell tour — apparently, they’re so undesirable they couldn’t even get a single buyout bid — the graduation goggles were donned and the eulogies were spat out in Tweet-sized soundbites:

“Oh, Borders! We’re so sad to see you go! RIP! #thankUBorders”

Ahem. Never-mind that we used to be sad to see stores like Borders driving out the smaller “Mom and Pop” bookstores. “THERE’S NO LIFE IN THESE MONSTROSITIES!” (We shopped there anyway. The selection and prices drew us in.)

Perhaps Borders is now — on its deathbed, mind you — allowed into the cool kids club (reading is cool, right?) because a new, even more damnable enemy is at hand:

The dreaded ebook!

As an ebook lending site, we often get an earful from those who just can’t quite come to terms with the rising popularity of digital books. It is, to put it mildly, eye-rollingly boorish behavior, and it’s the same basic sentiment that lamented the rise of photography, the advent of the printing press, and the growing popularity of the personal computer. 

It’s the argument that going to lose. 

Again.

The shockingly speedy demise of an outlet as big as Borders is a sign of things to come: In with the new, out with the old. Or, more likely, the old will live on, as the new gains slow, but inevitable, prominence.

The real problem isn’t that we’re moving on, it’s that no one will have learned the obvious (and recent) lessons from all the other times we’ve moved on: Fighting is only going to make things worse.

Print books aren’t going away. Libraries aren’t going away. The publishing industry isn’t in any real danger, beyond the self-inflicted wounds of short-sightedness.

Just as the music industry weathered the digital storm, so too will the publishing industry.

Will someone step up to embrace the digital future, or will we spend the next ten years as pawns in a losing battle against piracy? Indeed, will “piracy” be a convenient bogey-man, an overstated threat, used to buy time? Will customers be harassed in the name of the bottom line? Will publishers cite the demise of Borders as an excuse to tighten control and raise prices, spurred-on by traditionalists who want to avoid change, all at the expense of meaningful progress?

The smell of a book? The feel of a book in your hands? Meh. 

Let’s be real: Consumers want access above all else. Access to the content they want to read, and they don’t give a shit if it’s somehow encumbered with DRM so long as these digital controls don’t get in the way of reading; so long as a frightened industry doesn’t over-reach, as frightened industries so often do.

Digital is an opportunity. It is not, in and of itself, better. It can be better. There’s a chance that this could be done right. 

Here’s hoping the bores and the old guard don’t screw it up for everyone else — but they probably will, for far longer than necessary.

Sigh.

Hello, Alfred A. Knopf Books!

We couldn’t help but notice that you’re now following us on Tumblr. We think that’s really exciting. In fact, the last time we were this excited, Mallory from Family Ties (or is it Nellie from Arrested Development?) posted a tweet about Lendle when we were uncertain about our future.

We’ve said over and over and over that we would love to have a dialogue with anyone in a position to really get to the bottom of the business of how lending can promote authors and a culture of reading. We think that would be great for you, great for your authors, great for Amazon and, yes, great for us.

Most importantly, though, we think it would be great for your customers, many of whom are Lendlers. They really love reading, they love their Kindles and they’re buying books like crazy.

Formal, informal, we don’t care: Let’s talk.

We’ve got some great ideas.

Looking for lendable books? Good news!

Sometimes our focus on lending restrictions can seem a bit glass half empty, so we thought we’d end the work week on a glass half full post.

We were recently involved in a discussion in which it was posited that perhaps Amazon was responsible for the dearth of lendable titles in the Kindle store and, lacking evidence, we simply said we didn’t know.

Read More

Lendle by the Numbers

Here at Lendle, we love stats. We’ve learned a lot just by looking at the numbers, and one of our earliest goals was to provide information to our users that would convey useful and honest information about our site and the books that have been made available.

For instance, we make a point to tell our users that we only have one copy of a book if we only have one copy. We also tell users when we have 500 copies of a book. We’re open about it even if we don’t have any copies of a lendable book.

The alternative would certainly shield us from having to publicize certain numbers, but we’d also put our users in a position of never knowing whether someone actually owns the books they’re requesting. Mystery novels are great. Mystery requests aren’t.

We take this a step farther by telling our users exactly where they are in line for a book they’ve requested. Waiting is never fun, but waiting without having even a vague idea of how long the line is can be infuriating.

There are also practical benefits to transparency: Some users may decide they’d rather buy a book than wait. Others may realize they’ve got enough time to put in another request without worrying about whether they’ll get two books at once. Some may decide they don’t want to wait at all, which shortens the line for everyone else.

Available Now

There’s no more important number on a lending site than the number of books that are actually available to lend. We display that number whether you’ve signed up for Lendle, or not. 

As of right now, we’re at 7,049 available books. This means that 7,049 unique titles have been made available to lend. On the other hand, we have 22,085 available copies of lendable books, because many of our most popular titles are available from hundreds of Lendlers.

Our members know this, because we provide that number for each and every lendable book we’ve catalogued, alongside historical data about how many times a book has been requested and how many requests have actually been fulfilled.

Book detail pages include an activity timeline, which gives a real-time indication of how often a book is added and how often it’s lent, as well as how quickly the queue is moving. 

We think that’s incredibly useful.

We could also list every book we’ve ever catalogued, and try to impress new users by saying we have over 150,000 books in our system. What might not come across is that most of those books aren’t owned by anyone on Lendle, and of those that are, a large percentage aren’t lendable. If we ran a brewery, we wouldn’t lay claim to 600 beers if we only ever ordered 20 at a time from our distributor. Sadly, we do not own a brewery.

It’s never been about presenting the most impressive number, for us.

We’re well aware that we may miss out on potential Lendlers by being honest about our numbers, but our hope is that transparency leads to a better user experience and a better service.

We’re betting that informed users are happy users and, in the long run, we think that’s the most important metric. The number stuff will take care of itself.

Tag, you’re it!

Yesterday, we rolled out a feature which allows Lendlers to tag books. We’ve begun the process of pre-populating our catalogued books with basic tags, but only to get the ball rolling.

Long term, we think tags will open up a lot of possibilities when it comes to rolling out new features. (Stay tuned!) Most importantly, though, a well-tagged library of books will provide an easy way to narrow Lendle’s catalogue of available titles quickly, and more effectively, than by running a standard author or title search.

Tips:

If you’re going to tag, tag smart. Books are already categorized by author, genre, etc. Tags are best when they provide contextual information about a book that will help guide a reader to something they’ll enjoy, especially when used in combination searches: Crime + Fairies? Artemis Fowl. 

10 well-chosen tags will provide more value than 100 unnecessary tags (elf, elves, elfin, elfs) and complicated tags are borderline worthless. (Phrases don’t make good tags.) We’re trying to provide useful search results, not a guessing game.

Be sure to tag for accuracy, as we will endeavor to remove inappropriate tags as we find them, and we’ll be encouraging our Lendlers to do the same.