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Amazon To Allow Book Lending On the Kindle

Posted by timothy on from the glad-this-isn't-how-physical-books-act dept.

angry tapir writes "One of the oldest customs of book lovers and libraries — lending out favorite titles to friends and patrons — is finally getting recognized in the electronic age, at least in one electronic book reader: Amazon has announced that it plans to allow users of its Kindle book reader to 'lend' electronic books to other Kindle users, based on the publisher's discretion. A book can be lent only for up to 14 days. A single book can only be lent once, and the lender cannot read the book while it is loaned out." Kindle may be the best-known e-reader, but the similarly featured Barnes & Noble Nook has had this ability (complete with 14-day timeout) for several months, if not from its introduction.

12 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. sometimes, you have to ask yourself... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    is technology really improving our lives?

    1. Re:sometimes, you have to ask yourself... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The kindle is a great piece of hardware, but why buy books from Amazon when you can instead buy DRM-free ebooks from more enlightened publishers like Baen? Then you can lend ebooks without worrying about any silly restrictions. (Really, two weeks? I'm a bit envious of those who have enough free time for reading to reliably finish books in only two weeks...)

      Of course, some day I may run out of science fiction/fantasy/space opera/etc. authors that I like on Baen; I guess then I may have to decide between the immoral option of actually buying DRMed ebooks from Amazon and the illegal option of buying paperback editions and then pirating the corresponding ebooks.

    2. Re:sometimes, you have to ask yourself... by mysidia · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There's a little part of me that likes this. I can't tell you how many times I've lent stuff to people only to have it never come back - even after asking for it back.

      In this case, though, the restriction is too tight. There ought to be no specific time limit.

      The person who lent the book should have a 'return' button to push once they're done with it. They should be required to connect to the network every 7 days to verify the book is still lent out to them.

      When the person who lent the book selects the book they should have a 'request it back' button.

      Once it's requested back, the person who lent it out will get a text message sent by the person who lent it to them. They'll have 14 days to hit the 'return' button. 14 days after it's requested returned, the return is forced.

      The person who lent it should also have an ability to set a 'due back by date' when lending the title.

      Restriction against lending something again are absurd.

    3. Re:sometimes, you have to ask yourself... by Mathinker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > Do you think one can do this?

      Legally? Who knows. Why don't you go and hire a $200/hr lawyer to do some research about it. BTW, even if he says "yes", that doesn't mean that Amazon's lawyers won't someday decide "no". In fact, my guess is that it's probably unlikely that the Kindle book distribution service will outlive a healthy teenager of today. The most likely scenario is that suddenly one day those books will just disappear.

      OTOH, you probably could probably just as easily put your Kindle on/under your scanner/camera and just scan your books, page by page. Or even, *gasp*, download the books illegally from a public WiFi connection (they're *books*, no one is going to notice the bandwidth if you download them one at a time), or if you're uncomfortable with that, ask a friend who knows how to do this to do it for you and send you the books by email.

      Don't you feel any indignation at all that copyright has been twisted so much you have to go into intellectual contortions to think about how you might be able to pass on your books to your children after you die? And some of the best methods to do this are illegal?

    4. Re:sometimes, you have to ask yourself... by bzipitidoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, the solution is to find another business model. Stop expecting that there is a future in charging repeatedly for mere copies of collections of info, which with current technology anyone is quite capable of reproducing at extremely low cost.

      The reality is that information is not a scarce resource. These dinosaurs are clinging hard to the recent past when information was tied to media that is a scarce resource and wasn't so easily copied. That has changed, big time. They hold back all kinds of progress, to the detriment of us all. Copying is not a sin, and no excuse need be made for it. The sins being committed and garbage excuses being made are the ones the content industries do to justify themselves. There is no justification for the arrogant idiocy known as DRM, particularly that sort which not only tries to exert more control than they have a right to, but which recklessly endangers others' information, as the Sony root kit did. Nor is there justification for their purchase of ever more ridiculous and unenforceable laws such as the various "3 strikes" provisions, their pursuit of ordinary citizens for "piracy" for purposes of terrorizing the public and not just recovering compensation for alleged harms suffered, and their furious attempts to contain DRM breakage by resorting to extremes such as overzealous arrests and jail time for people such as DVD Jon and Dmitry Sklyarov, who are not criminals. And they do all this no matter what that costs in damage to reputations including those beyond their own, in the chilling of scientific and technological advance, and in the showcasing of tools, techniques, and arguments other reactionary forces are only too eager to use for their own nefarious agendas, as seen in things such as those ACTA drafts that they tried to keep secret, and the routine abuse of the DMCA to keep information from the public.

      --
      Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
  2. sounds like an opening for my new startup by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's well-known that venture capitalists are increasingly interested in diversifying beyond the web into "atom-based" startups, i.e. companies working on manufacturing physical items. This is a perfect opening. While the traditional e-book has served us well for years, some of its limitations become apparent when one wants to run a lending system. It can be implemented, but clearly in an onerous manner. That's why my new startup will propose to make physical e-books. They'll be just as readable and affordable as the traditional e-books you know and love, but with our new permaprint technology, the text will actually be physically imprinted onto thin surfaces; a stack of such surfaces will contain the contents of a book. Since each permaprint e-book will be imprinted on a separate stack of surfaces, which can be moved separately, lending will be as simple as lending the appropriate stack. As an added bonus, battery life is much improved.

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  3. Pathetic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Pathetic artificial restrictions in a feature only needed because it is on a platform with pathetic artificial restrictions itself. Go fuck yourselves.

  4. Re:Lent once at a time, or once ever? by guyminuslife · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I look forward to the websites letting people legally trade ebooks with one another

    This is what will kill this plan; or rather, what will convince publishers to never, ever, ever allow ebook lending. It would be possible to set up a site, or a protocol for lending books, where you share the unused books you have licensed in a big pool with a bunch of other people; members who share will simply check out books from the pool. Then, it's fishes and loaves: if you have 2 copies of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", and 100 people who want to read it, they can all read from those two copies, 2 at a time. That would call for a queue, but a less popular book might not. And even if you don't want to wait in queue, if you purchase a copy, then there will be 3 books in the total pool....and eventually there will be more copies than there are interested readers at any given time, and no one will have to buy the book.

    People complain about first-sale doctrine with digital goods, and I understand, but the fact of the matter is that the potential for a streamlined secondary market for digital content is a much larger liability than it is for physical goods. Even having to make the trip to GameStop to sell your copy of Prince of Persia is prohibitive compared to being able to purchase a game, immediately license it out to people on the cloud, and then license a different copy whenever you feel like playing it.

    --
    I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
  5. Hmmm... by mordejai · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've lent several books to friends and relatives.

    Most of them had the books for months or years, returned something that didn't look at all like the book I gave them, or didn't return them at all.

    So, this new "feature" is not at all like lending books!

  6. Re:Lent once at a time, or once ever? by alannon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If only there was some sort of brick & mortar equivalent of such a scheme to use as a point of comparison, but then, surely our society would never allow some sort of public book repository where a member of the public could borrow the book for a limited amount of time, as that would have destroyed the book publishing industry! Who would ever want to own their own copy of a book if they could just borrow it for free?!

  7. Re:Lent once at a time, or once ever? by icebraining · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The publishers don't have to give us ebooks. They can refuse to put out anything but paper books.

    Even if most won't, some will, and they'll make a killing - even if the margins are low, the company with the monopoly always makes a good buck. Then it'll eat the others' market, which will have to follow suit if they want even a small piece of the pie. It's simple market based economy.

    --
    Dilbert RSS feed
  8. Re:Still not good enough. by MHolmesIV · · Score: 5, Informative

    This would be reasonable if the digital versions cost less than the paper. This is often not the case. (Dammit Slashdot, fix your comment system, I had to type the entire URL because for some reason I'm not allowed to paste...)

    Let's look at a $7.99 paperback: (like this one)
    Components making up the selling of this book are:
    Retail Markup: (30-45% for B&N) (We'll go with 30 for simplicity) :$2.40
    Wholesale Markup: 10%: $0.79
    Author Royalties: 8-15% (Lets be generous, publishers rarely are): $1.20 (I normally hear around $0.70 per paperback, but we're being generous)
    Printing: 10%: $0.79
    Pre-production (editing etc): 10-15%: $1.20
    Other (Marketing, lunches, power ties...): The rest.: $1.60

    With an Ebook, you can cut out the wholesaler and the printing cost. Marketing is probably a lot cheaper too, since it's taken care of for you by the digital seller (amazon, itunes). No big cardboard cutouts, no phoning stores asking them to stock the book etc. Pre-production is slightly cheaper, since you don't have to worry nearly as much about absolutely perfect layout, since the ebook formats don't support it anyway. (As far as I've noticed, they don't even bother proofreading the ebook versions...)

    We've cut out at least $1.50 from the costs, and probably closer to $2-3.
    Unfortunately, if we just reduced the selling price by that much, the author would get screwed (they get a percentage), so authors need to think about that when negotiating. I would say reasonable royalties on ebooks are 25%. So for the author to get the same $1.20, the selling price of the ebook should be around $4.80. With the agency model, that would be $1.44 for the retailer, $1.20 for the author, and $2.16 for the publisher, which would easily take care of their associated costs.

    Of course, that's not what happens. As we see, the books sell for about the same (maybe $1 less), and the publisher skims twice their normal share.

    Baen, the only enlightened ebook publisher, has a guideline that they sell their e-books for around 75% of the lowest cost paper edition, capped at about $6. It's done very well for them, but it's going to take years for the dinosaurs in the rest of the publishing business to die out and be replaced by people that actually know what's going on.