Mass Hysteria in the Digital Age: LendInk, Lending, and Author’s Rights

The first DMCA notice came in almost a week ago. Then a second, and a third.

In total, we heard from about five authors who were confused about Lendle’s role in the lending process. It was clear that someone, somewhere, was talking about services like ours, with the thought that we were somehow lending actual copies of books without permission.

The first notice we received contained a reference to LendInk, so it became clear that the author had sent out multiple takedown notices.

In each case we sent out the same response, usually within minutes of receiving the notice:

Hi, [author].

We are not lendink. I’ll assume you sent this same email to lendink and that, as such, the reference to lendink here is a typo in that you simply and understandably forgot to change the email address when you sent us the same takedown notice.

With that said, we cannot agree that we are infringing on your copyright as we are simply displaying materials that are part of Amazon’s public API, operating in compliance of Amazon’s guidelines. You presumably agreed to be a part of this API when you agreed to sell your book via Amazon. If not, this is an issue you will want to take up there.

We do not sell or license or give out any content from your book. We merely display materials which are part of Amazon’s public API (title, description, cover, etc.) at which point customers are directed to Amazon to purchase a copy of your book or they are able to state that they have already purchased the book from Amazon. If a customer has paid for a copy of a book and that book comes with a lending license (a decision that is between an author/publisher and amazon) those customers are then able to use that lending license by utilizing Amazon’s lending service. We do not facilitate loans, nor do we condone or facilitate illegal sharing of books. If anything, we are driving and encouraging sales of your books through the official channel you chose to sell them.

Unfortunately, the only way we can prevent information about your book (which, incidentally, is all fair use information) from appearing on our site is if you have your book removed from Amazon’s API. This is not something we can accomplish as you control the contract you signed with Amazon.

Sincerely, 

Brian Ford

Lendle

In almost every instance, that email alone was sufficient to calm the concerns of the authors in question. In fact, one of the authors engaged in a nice back and forth about lending rights, her confusion, our service, and the role that lending might be able to play in promoting her books. 

GENESIS

Still, I was curious, and working off the hunch that LendInk was somehow at the center of the storm I discovered that dozens of authors over the course of two or three days had descended on the LendInk Facebook page to demand answers.

Many were claiming to have sent out multiple takedown notices, and threats of class action lawsuits were already being bandied about, but one thing was clear: The owner of LendInk hadn’t yet responded to any of the posts or concerns or notices — either via email or by posting an explanation on the Facebook page. 

Further digging revealed that LendInk had been running on autopilot for several months due to health issues suffered by the current owner.

Eventually, the authors focused their fire on LendInk’s hosting service and because LendInk wasn’t responding to notices, the host made the understandable decision to pull the plug.

That brings us to today.

Beyond comments on a couple of the articles that covered the takedown, we’ve been content to sit in the nosebleed section and observe.

For one thing, we suspected that the situation would blow over fairly quickly, given LendInk’s “all but officially dead” status prior to the dustup. 

Instead, the snowball is now a snowboulder, and it’s still rolling down the mountain.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

CNET was one of the first major sites to take a crack at covering the controversy. The Verge weighed in. GIGAOM has a take. Even the EFF has gotten involved.

Something that I’ve been pondering is “why LendInk” when there are at least three other sites that have seen more press, are arguably more popular, and which all operate in the same manner?

I can’t speak for any other site, but I think it helped that we were very quick to respond as the notices came in. As I said in the comment I posted on the CNET article, no matter how misguided the attacks were, it can’t have been comforting to go two or three days without a response to a serious infringement concern.

I have no doubt in my mind that the vast majority of the authors who sent notices did so in good faith, even if that good faith was rooted in an easily cured misunderstanding and a subsequent rush to judgement.

I think we’ve also built up a very active userbase that would have been quick to come to our defense.

We don’t participate in every Amazon forum thread in which we’re mentioned, but we’re definitely aware that our users are actively educating authors and skeptics about the process when they talk up our service. (Thanks for that!)

If Lendle — or one of the other major lending sites — had been the focus of the controversy, the forum discussions might have been more balanced and the fallout probably would have been avoided.

The other major issue is that (most of) the media didn’t take notice until days after LendInk was shut down.

The sad truth of the matter is that the publishing industry has never seemed quite as sexy as the music industry or the movie industry, and that’s reflected in the dearth of coverage.

Unfortunately, this means mainstream media outlets and influential tech blogs tend to ignore digital lending issues unless there’s a controversy. 

It takes a lot of dedication to stay in the spotlight.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

The fallout has been nothing if not predictable: Some authors have expressed regret, others have dug in their heels — one person is even justifying the takedown of a legal site as a “warning” to actual pirate sites — and consumer outrage has led to calls for boycotts and negative reviews.

Some people are even encouraging LendInk to file lawsuits.

What good will any of that do? If consumers are angry that something like this could happen, the best possible outcome is to write rational, positive letters to Amazon (or Barnes and Noble) letting them know how awesome and useful their lending service is.  

Send that same letter to publishers even if they don’t currently support a lending program.

Most importantly, go buy a book from an author that does currently support lending.

Maybe lending programs don’t work quite as well as they could or maybe you think they should do even more. The best way to make that happen is to show authors and publishers that you’re willing to put your money where you mouth is: Apple convinced the music industry to go DRM-free only after consumers opened their wallets to support digital music. 

If LendInk is to come back — if it’s even feasible for the owner to bring LendInk back — the best possible result is that they come back to a groundswell of support for lending and a positive campaign to raise awareness about the programs offered by Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Encouraging a lawsuit without even understanding the chances of success or the costs involved is knee-jerk reactionism, at best.

Attacking authors — even those that are actively and intentionally spreading misinformation — serves no useful purpose.

Encouraging retaliatory piracy certainly isn’t going to help, either.

Revenge may sound good on paper but it’s not going to solve any problems and will likely make the situation even worse. 

We’ve spent the better part of our existence trying to raise awareness — through blog posts and tweets and responsive customer service — and we’ve done our best to talk up the benefits of social sharing when approached by concerned authors, all with the goal of creating a productive dialogue.

Clearly, there’s still work to be done.

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. 

Lending Rights (and Wrongs)

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.

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.

Support Lendle: Become a Patron

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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Why we don’t embrace a “free books” mindset

Everyone loves free, right? We all want to feel like we’re getting something that others are paying for, and bargains are great, especially with the economy still in shambles. Even so, we’ve said since the beginning that we have no interest in being seen as a destination for free content, or as an alternative to purchases.

Of course, we know that people will occasionally tweet about Lendle as a destination for free books. The only thing we can do is control our own messaging to reinforce the image that we’d like to convey.

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itallworksout asked: Whenever I go to lend a book, im taken to an amazon page of 404- Document not found saying the web address does not function. Because of this i am unable to lend and therefor being threatened with negative feedback, I am more than willing to lend my books however cant get it to work when i click the links...help??

From our FAQ:

When I click the “Loan the book” button, I see Amazon’s product page or an error page, not a pre-populated lending form.

This means you don’t have permission to lend that book. The possible reasons for this are:

1. You don’t own that book.
2. You own the book, but are unable to lend it. Generally this occurs because you’ve already lent it before.
3. You own a different edition of the book than the one you are trying to lend. You may have chosen an edition other than the one you own when you searched for the book on Lendle. This is the most frequent cause of this issue. Be sure you have listed on Lendle the same edition of the book you actually own.

The best way to ensure that you are entering the correct book is to search for books via Amazon’s ASIN. For example, here is Amazon’s product page for a lending-enabled Kindle book:

Water for Elephants

If you scroll down to the Product Details section, you’ll see that the ASIN for the book is: B003I1WY2A

You can use that number in Lendle’s search field. ASINs are unique and will always turn up the correct product. For example, Water for Elephants is currently available as a Kindle book in at least three different editions — only two of which are lendable. Each edition has its own ASIN. We recommend linking to Amazon’s product pages for your books from your “Manage my Kindle” list, and copying and pasting the corresponding ASINs into our search field or, better yet, as a list into our Import by ASIN tool. When doing so, ASINs are entered one per line:

ASIN

ASIN

ASIN

We get this question a lot, but without direct access to the information on your Kindles, the best we can do is hope that our Lendlers are as diligent as possible about entering the correct books. 

Lastly, if at any point you are unable to complete a lend, it is important that you return to the Lendle page with the lending instructions and click the I WAS UNABLE TO LEND IT button. (Step 7 in our guide to lending.) Doing so ensures that you are not dinged for failing to lend a book.

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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