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.

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.

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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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.

End of day, I’m ok with things like Lendle.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!