Lendle-ing again
Well two-and-a-half cheers! eBook-sharing is back on the agenda again.
One day after stopping Lendle in its tracks, Amazon relented and they’re back in business again, with just a teensy bit of sync-ing goodness (‘useful but non-essential’ say Lendle triumphantly) removed. If only we could deal with all the world’s great crises so amicably!
And for indie publishers and writers, it’s an important victory too, because it leaves us the right to choose whether we want to share our books or not. If Lendle is to survive, so will Booklending.com, and both figure in my long-term marketing plan.
… With Reservations
But the news doesn’t quite get the full three cheers.
First there was a thumbs down from Shiori, the Japanese student who’s been living with us for several months now. I used ‘Lendle’ for a few harmless pronunciation exercises. Sadly, she now hates the word, and says the thing would never catch on in Japan anyway, with a name like that.
Not that she needs to worry, not yet anyway. Because when I started the sign-up process with Lendle, this was the Welcome I got:
Please note that Lendle is currently only available in the United States. We expect Amazon to allow book lending elsewhere soon.
Well, I’m a Brit, and the news wasn’t entirely a surprise. You know what we’re like, we’d be awful at returning books on time – though perhaps not as bad as your George Washington who, I hear, had a book out on loan from 1789 until last year – and then got off without paying the $300,000 late fee.
But the Japanese, the Germans, the Swedes … surely you could have trusted them!?
My guess is that Amazon will want to install a GPS book-sniffing device inside each eBook before introducing sharing outside the US, so that recalcitrant foreign libracriminals can be hunted down. Whether the expiry of the Patriot Act at the end of May will have any impact is hard to say.
But at least the principle seems now to have been accepted – that writers should have the choice whether to offer their books for sharing or not.
With big reservations
Of course, there will still be writers who think that Amazon’s change-of-heart will open the door to unspeakable evils, and this view has been eloquently expressed by Steven Lewis on the Kindle Writers blog. In an open letter to Jeff Croft, co-founder of Lendle, he writes:
Maybe I don’t have Mr Croft’s vision thing. Have I even understood your business correctly? (It is a business, right?) After all, as a publisher, I have what Mr Croft calls an old school business model, that’s the one where I expect to be paid for my work.
Perhaps you agree with Steven. That’s fine. If so then you don’t need to offer up your books for sharing. Everyone should have the right to opt out too. But before you come to a decision about it, take a look at the comments following Steven’s post. As well as a response from Croft, you’ll find other writers making a cogent case for participating in a book-sharing scheme – because they’re convinced it will increase both readers AND income.
Getting started with sharing
We’ll let the argument rage over there. Assuming you have made the decision to be a book-sharer, where do you go from there?
The starting-point is your copyright notice – and I was delighted today to get a ringing endorsement for the wording I’ve proposed from none other than Andy Woodworth, the co-sponsor of the eBook User’s Bill of Rights. So you could share this too.
Treat this ebook as you would a printed book. If you enjoy it and want to share it with friends and family – as we hope you will – then please do so. The best support you can give is by helping to spread the word about a (publisher’s) author or book. All we ask is that you respect the author’s right to make a living from his art: so please do not re-distribute this book in any format for commercial purposes, or modify the content in any way.
But that’s only the start. Just because I allow people to share my book, it doesn’t follow that anyone will want to do so. There are 130 million other books published (according to Google, whose plans to scan all of them came to a crashing halt yesterday at the end of a long-running law-suit). Over 18 million WordPress blogs – and probably as many more that are not WordPress). 200 million Twitter users sending 1 billion tweets a week, as Twitter celebrates its 5th birthday today. How has your book got a chance unless it’s either extraordinarily good – and even then maybe not – or extraordinarily bad?
That’s where we’ll start next time – with a look at how to create passionate early adopters, those who will help to launch your book out into the world.
Sources
- Lendle statement ‘back in business’
- The Guardian, 20 May, 2010 : George Washington’s library pecadillo
- Kindle Writers letter to Lendle – be sure to read the comments too
- The eBook User’s Bill of Rights – where this discussion first started
- Wikipedia: Google Books: plan to scan every book ever written
- Suite101.com – discussing the dispute between Google and Amazon+Microsoft after yesterday’s court ruling
- Techshout.com – reporting on a deal to display 18 million WordPress blogs on the iPad
- Fastcompany – Twitter statistics on its 5th birthday – March 23
- Mashable on Rebecca Black – it’s March madness, how could there not be a Rebecca Black reference? Must-read article!
References::
Related posts – Writers without Borders:
Tags: Amazon, e-publishing, ebook, Indie writer, marketing, readers, sharing books, Twitter, Wordpress
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Hi Alain,
Thanks for the mention. My post certainly attracted a lot of attention, right down to anonymous emails.
What fascinated me about the challenge I laid down to the proponents of lending to say what they would consider a reasonable limitation on the lending of an ebook. None of them did, including Lendle’s founder who came on to have his say but studiously avoided the big question. They were all staunch in their believe in a “right” to lend but none was willing to say whether that right had any limitations at all. Do they really think they should be able to “lend” their book simultaneously to an unlimited number of people for an indefinite period? It seems so.
In your copyright notice you invite readers to treat your ebook as a printed book. It sounds nice but what does it mean? I can’t lend my printed book to two people at the same time, but I could do that with an ebook. Is that all right under your agreement?
You say, “If you enjoy it and want to share it with friends and family – as we hope you will – then please do so”. Is that a truly unlimited offer? What if I consider the users of the Pirate Bay to be my friends?
The rush to a 99 cents price for books and the complaints authors get when they charge more than a couple of dollars for their book tell me that your faith in readers to respect an author’s right to a living might be misplaced!
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Steven – you’ve certainly opened up the debate – and it’s an important one. I agree with you completely – we need to be really clear that the invitation to share does not authorize people to take a gazillion copies of our work and distribute them. When Andy Woodworth first posted the ‘Bill of Rights’ there was a similar misunderstanding – he’s now made it clear that he doesn’t mean that either.
In one way, the writer of fiction is in a different position from a non-fiction writer, who writes, say, walking guides to a city. Your non-fiction books are necessary to the reader – they might not be able to do it without you. But nobody ‘needs’ fiction. As Auden wrote ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’. And that makes it so much harder to get the message out when there are a million other people in the same non-essential market. This is why the early adopter concept, the passionate supporter, is so important.
We share one important thing though. We both want to make a living out of this. I’m not suggesting sharing because I want a warm fuzzy feeling that people are reading what I have to say. It’s because I honestly believe that the sharing model works as a business proposition. Most of the authors I care about now, and whose books I buy, I first met in a library or a friend passed me a book. It’s happened twice to me in the last couple of months, with Khalid Hosseini and Jasper Fforde.
What we now need – and fast – is a clear definition of what consititutes fair – and a form of words which protects us, legally, from those who will try to take advantage of this approach – as they certainly will. We need too to work out a relationship with libraries, which have always been powerful influencers. And they need us I think, as much as we need them.
If we work on this as a community in the coming days and weeks, sharing ideas, I’m sure we could come up with a better model. Bookshops are in decline, libraries are underfunded, the web’s a jungle … there has to be a better way.
What am I doing writing this at 5 in the morning. Sorry if its incoherent!
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We really appreciate the article. The first thing I would say is that we wish we could extend lending and borrowing to our international friends. Unfortunately, Amazon’s policies are such that, because non-US kindlers can’t lend, we’d have a massive portion of our members borrowing and not lending. Not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t. That would 1) mean we’d have to let them borrow without ever buying a book and 2) that we’d have fewer successful lends and/or longer waits. As soon as Amazon workout licensing, we’ll allow lending outside the US.
And — I’m being honest here — Steven didn’t open up the debate. He posted a rude open letter that was needlessly confrontational and sarcastic and used our press to draw attention to himself. He was accusatory and often wrong about our goals and motivations and any number of writers have asked us similar questions with similar reservations but without the attitude. We’ve been happy to talk with them. It should also be said that many writers are thrilled with Lendle and have told us so. We didn’t avoid questions, we avoided a person who was trying to start an argument rather than a discussion.
“I can’t lend my printed book to two people at the same time, but I could do that with an ebook. Is that all right under your agreement?”
This is what I mean. This is factually inaccurate. You have MORE rights with a regular book. You can lend a Kindle book once, and even if you could lend it more than once no one at Lendle (or anywhere that I’ve read) has ever suggested that a reader able to lend to multiple people at once. It’s hyperbole (or fear mongering) to suggest otherwise.
We love this discussion. We welcome it. We respect reasonable debate. But, we won’t debate with anyone who calls into question the integrity of our users (who also happen to be their customers) or who insults anyone at Lendle as a starting point.
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Brian – I fully appreciate that it’s an Amazon decision not to open the lending floodgates to Europe, not Lendle’s. And it’s par for the course. When Amazon’s author royalty rate rose from 35% to 70%, it happened in the US several months earlier than the rest of the world. Similarly, it’s not been easy for us to avoid double taxation, with a withholding tax in the US, then taxation here. (What was it the original Tea Party wanted – ‘no taxation without representation’? Tables neatly turned here 240 years later – but don’t worry, we’re a peaceful lot, and we promise not to rebel!)
But these problems eventually get worked out – it’s partly that everything’s moving so quickly as the market changes. I’m quite sure that the rest of the world will be able to share sharing sometime in the next few months, if not the next few weeks.
I agree – it’s a fascinating conversation, and it’s fun to be at the leading edge of change. On the writing front, there’s the challenge of technology: just as the novel could not have existed before the printing press, so new forms of story-telling are bound to emerge from e-publishing. And then in distribution and marketing, old assumptions are challenged every day, and our institutions – the bookshops, the libraries, our publishing houses – are under pressure to evolve.
Change is never comfortable. It was always better in the old days. It’s hard for all of us to grasp new visions when we were comfortable with the way we always did things. And even those who embrace change are not going to agree on everything.
Don’t be hard on Steven. What he did was to create a great deal of interest in a very important issue – that wouldn’t have happened if his tone had been moderate. In fact, I wouldn’t have known about Amazon’s change of heart unless his letter had landed in my Inbox. If you look at my exchange with Steven earlier today, you’ll see that while we don’t agree on everything, the discussion has been useful – Steven’s got me thinking, and we independent writers really do need to answer his key question: what constitutes reasonable use, reasonable sharing. I’d like to make a contribution to the dialog and will continue to post here, as I have for several days now. We still won’t agree with one another, we writers – that’s why we’re independent. You have a good word – ‘ornery’. Changing your mind is OK too. Learning to value the opinions of those who have a different world view.
Thank you for passing by, and for taking the time to contribute. I’m looking forward to working with you guys … when we’re .. liberated.
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I’m typing from an iPhone while on the road during vacation, so pardon my typos.
When I get a chance later tonight, I’ll link to some articles that I think have been a more helpful, and deeper look at this topic. Some great content came out of amazon’s decisions to revoke and then reinstate our API access.
We have no issue with Steven. We simply wish his open letter had been written in a way that made us feel comfortable engaging in a real discussion. No one wants to begin a back and forth having been (wrongly) accused of things. We’re putting the finishing touches on a blog that will allow us to tell our story, rather than have others tell it for us.
We still think we’re the fairest lending service, whether you consider authors, publishers, or readers, and that we’re set up in a way that encourages buying, more so than any of our competitors. At any rate, I’ll be sure to stop back in later tonight.
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People have been lending books to each other since, well, since there were books to lend. Why should we expect that the digital age would change that? Sure, all of us want to sell as many as we can, but we (should) also want as many people to read the book as can do so. As another writer friend said to me, “Piracy is going to happen anyway. Why put DRM on your book and add a restriction that might turn off that first set of eyes?” He’s right. Without the first look, there is no “hey, I read this book, you should check it out” and so on.
End of day, I’m ok with things like Lendle.
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For clarity, I’d like to make it clear that I’m endorsing a principle, not a product, and Allen sets the right tone when he says ‘I’m ok with things like Lendle.’ There are other ebook lending services available too, and one that I’ve found is Booklending.com. I’m adding both services to the Resources page on this blog in the category ‘Sharing ebooks’.
Brian, thanks for contributing, and I look forward to reading the Lendle story on your blog. I’m sure there are lessons to be learnt for all of us. Not least, the dangers of locking yourself in to one partner business which can turn your product off in an instant. For indie writers and e-publishers like me, I guess the moral is to spread your options as wide as possible – not to distribute only through one channel.
Steven, you’ve taken a bit of a battering – here, and on the Kindle Writers blog – for expressing honest opinions in a forthright way. My view? All credit to you for having a point of view and making life interesting. And you’ve raised one very important issue: when does sharing become stealing? I’ll be exploring this further in the coming days – and I’ll know we’ve probably got it right when you‘re satisfied.
But for this post, I think that’s a wrap.
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For clarity, I’d like to make it clear that I’m endorsing a principle, not a product, and Allen sets the right tone when he says ‘I’m ok with things like Lendle.’ There are other ebook lending services available too, and one that I’ve found is Booklending.com. I’m adding both services to the Resources page on this blog in the category ‘Sharing ebooks’.
I didn’t expect you to chooses side, but anyone who wants to have this discussion needs to consider the differences between the various services. As I said, we require people to buy (and lend) to borrow. Other services don’t have any requirement at all like that. You can literally sign up and borrow as much as you want. It’s a little odd to me that this wasn’t pointed out in the other article.
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No, Brian, I’m not going to take sides – and for anyone who happens to read this, let’s make sure they’re really aware of the differences – as you say, this may be important in the decision writers make to put up their books for lending or not.
You’re absolutely right, although I needed to read the instructions on both Bookreading.com and Lendle carefully. Lendle requires a borrower also to be a lender: in other words they must have purchased at least one Kindle book. At Bookreading.com, no such requirement is specified: a reader can borrow without lending.
But there’s another important difference too. A Lendle user lists all their Kindle books to make them all potentially available for borrowing. Presumably (I’m a little frustrated here because I can’t log on to see the site), this will mean that a borrower can pick fairly indiscriminately from a very wide range of books … although of course the owner may refuse to lend. It feels a little bit like the bad old days of Kazaa.
On Bookreading, owners select specific books they wish to lend, and a borrower needs to go looking for a specific book. I suppose you could argue that they could just run down the list and take the first book to hand. But somehow it feels less random.
Having looked at both sites carefully, I have to admit, I’m thinking again. I’m deeply committed to the principle of sharing, but I’d prefer to see targeted sharing, with dedicated supporters of a book selecting people who might enjoy reading it. If you check back to my original post – ‘Go on! Lend my book’, you’ll see that was the approach I was advocating there. I rather like Seth Godin’s approach in The Domino Project, where he’ll make 5 or 52 packs of books available to supporters to distribute to friends and colleagues.
In all of this too, we haven’t mentioned the role that libraries could and should play in e-Lending – and I’ll be posting on that shortly.
These are just thoughts that I hope will help as you further develop and refine the Lendle product. I wish you well, I really do, but since I’m a supporter, don’t be surprised if those who are less supportive ask the same questions.
One final thing. On the BookLending site they explain that users with a US Amazon.com account can register, even if they live outside the US. Since my ebooks are distributed on the American site, I obviously have a US account, as well as a UK account – and I’ve therefore been able to sign up with Booklending. I may not be doing a great deal of borrowing or lending myself, but since my books are potentially being lent, I’d like to be able to see what I’m getting into before I give my consent. Perhaps you should look into this. There’s a pretty strong contingent of UK writers distributing though Amazon US – and I’m sure the same is true of writers in other countries. Thanks.
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On the BookLending site they explain that users with a US Amazon.com account can register, even if they live outside the US. Since my ebooks are distributed on the American site, I obviously have a US account, as well as a UK account – and I’ve therefore been able to sign up with Booklending.
This is an important point. First, I believe Amazon uses geography as well as account status to enforce their lending policy. So, those outside the US can borrow, but cannot lend. And, if there IS a way, it’s probably not a way that the vast majority of our users would ever utilize because it’d be more trouble than it’s worth.
A couple things about this:
1) We really, really want to open up to people outside the US. But, because of this policy, we believe we’d be sanctioning borrowing without buying by opening up to people who literally CANNOT lend, whether they want to or not. That’s not author or publisher friendly.
2) It’s even less friendly to our community of users who CAN lend. If we were to open up to people outside the US, we’d double or triple our user base. Except, we’d ONLY double or triple the number of people who are borrowing, and not the number of people who are lending. So, suddenly, our books-to-user ratio would be incredibly lopsided, and everyone would find that they’d have a harder time getting requests. (And you better believe we’d get complaints about that.) Yes, we’d be able to brag and boast about a much, much larger user base, but we don’t think it’s worth the trade off in user experience.
So, until Amazon opens up, officially, to people outside the US, we don’t see much of an upside to allowing it. Again, we hope Amazon works out licensing soon, but it’s really beyond our control.
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