Amazon shuts down Lendle

It's a shame but they kind of had this coming. Amazon's book-lending feature only really works with their business model as long it is just small groups of people lending to each other. They were never going to stand for people circumventing the whole model of individual payment by sharing books with random strangers over the internet.

I'm not saying Amazon (and the whole e-book industry) is morally right in restricting sharing like this, but you can't expect them not to stand up for their own interests.

In the long term, I'm sure we'll end up with freely distributable e-books. But that won't happen via Amazon's or Apple's online stores, which are quite clearly on the side of restricting distribution in order to charge for it.

It amazes me that the e-book providers think they can head down the same road as the music industry and not end up in the same spot.

I'm a serious Kindle user -- I have dozens of books. I've thought about using DRM-cracking software to free up my books, not because of any desire to share or lend but just because it's not right having a book in my possession locked away under a secret key some other bunch of people control.

This announcement doesn't bode well for Amazon. Technology can help you find markets, technology can enable markets, but using technology to force a market to appear where none did before doesn't have such a great track record. Everybody understands that you read a book, you share it (or give it away). There is no further sale. Lendle was simply trying to help Amazon work in a natural way that people commonly understand.

I crack the hell out of my Kindle purchases. Not for piracy, but so I can read them on Apple's superior iBooks app. It's pretty simple to do. Funny part is, I didn't start buying Amazon eBooks until I was certain I could defeat their DRM.

The Kindle iPad app is anus.

The reason is certainly that Amazon intended the lending feature to be used between a person's small network of acquaintances. This means that the likelihood of being able to borrow every book you want should be pretty low. Lendle gamed this by expanding the set of people with which you share / borrow. At that scale, the feature probably reduced Amazon's sales more significantly than the intended usage.