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Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

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Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#21

Post by tejaswiy »

anamax wrote: post #12
allwein wrote: post #7

I think that it's ridiculous that the lent book is unavailable to the original purchaser while it's loaned out. That completely defeats the purpose of an e-book. Edit: Do the downvoters disagree on the benefits of having a book in electronic form? Or do they think that the restrictions are not unreasonable/ridiculous?

How would you suggest that book sellers handle lending. Note the word "sellers" - they don't make any money from lending, just from selling. They're really scared that they'll sell one copy and everyone will read that copy (or copies of it). Note - "they should make less money" isn't an answer.

The same way that they've been handling it till now. Book lending isn't really a new invention. Even with the turn off the wireless hack, you can have a max of two copies of the book at once. I don't think it's that big a deal.

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#22

Post by rit »

allwein wrote: post #18
rit wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Otherwise it's piracy. I can't read my copy of the physical book while my friend is borrowing it. It is a reasonable compromise between amazon and the publishers that will hopefully become better as time goes by. As the publishers become more and more comfortable with it and less concerned that it will destroy their business (e.g. they'll need to adapt) the restrictions will get lighter, much like they did with…

How is it piracy? They would still have the restriction of a single lending for a single 14-day period. Right now, my girlfriend and I are reading the same physical book. I read it at work over my lunch break and she reads it at night before going to bed. Is this piracy too?

Sorry, Im generalizing more of how the publisher views it.

I think based on the current connectivity and technology of things this is probably the best compromise they could come up with.

Your girlfriend and I can't read the book at the same physical time (unless you read at the same pace and are at the same point, I suppose). A distributed lock mechanism could be used for it, but it doesn't look like Amazon came up with these terms - the publishers did. See my other comment, but this is the exact same terms which were set on the Nook lending when it came out.

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#23

Post by rdamico »

rit wrote: post #16

A lot of people are speculating if Amazon came up with these terms or not. From everything I can find (esp. this article - http://gizmodo.com/5388168/dont-get-too-excited-about-the-no... ) the restrictions on Kindle lending are identical to the ones the Nook has (at least when it rolled out). The B&N site for Nook currently states: Exclusive LendMe™ Technology NOOK's exclusive LendMe™ technology lets you share favori…

"Exclusive LendMe™ Technology"

Looks like Marketing really had fun with this one :)

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#24

Post by allwein »

rit wrote: post #22
allwein wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it piracy? They would still have the restriction of a single lending for a single 14-day period. Right now, my girlfriend and I are reading the same physical book. I read it at work over my lunch break and she reads it at night before going to bed. Is this piracy too?

Sorry, Im generalizing more of how the publisher views it. I think based on the current connectivity and technology of things this is probably the best compromise they could come up with. Your girlfriend and I can't read the book at the same physical time (unless you read at the same pace and are at the same point, I suppose). A distributed lock mechanism could be used for it, but it doesn't look like Amazon came up…

No problems. I get the point, and understand your take on the publisher's views. As someone else mentioned, it's the same growing pains we had to go through with digital music, and there is some frustration that we'll have to deal with the same issues over and over again for each new industry.

My girlfriend and I have already solved the lending issue by sharing a single Amazon account for just our Kindle purchases. Then we both just registered our Kindles to that shared account. The only problem we run into is trying to remember not to "sync to furthest page read" for anything we're both reading at the same time.

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#25

Post by allwein »

rit wrote: post #19

The sad part of the only lend once restriction that seems to be prevalent is that the most likely side effect of the 14 day loan is using it to get your friends or family hooked on a series. I just sent my sister a trial loan for the first book in a series I enjoyed and think she will, and I don't really forsee her calling or emailing me to ask for the second book. If she likes it she'll just buy it herself and keep…

At some point, Kindles are going to get cheap enough (~$50) that I'm not going to mind lending one out indiscriminately. I'll just load one up with the ebook I want to lend and then let my friend borrow it for however long it takes him to read it.

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#26

Post by allwein »

rit wrote: post #15
dave1619 wrote: post #9

Can you really loan out a book just once in its lifetime? Or just once every 14 days?

It looks like it depends on the book. The publishers get to set that restriction. If I recall, the same obnoxious restriction was enabled on Nook lending as well. Hopefully this will lighten as time goes by and the publishers stop being so short sighted. I think they're worried about the loopholes involved such as the turning off wireless with another poster already confirmed works.

Can you point out somewhere that it says the number of lends is set by the publisher? I only saw that the publisher's were in charge of whether it was lendable or not, and not the individual terms of the lend.

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#27

Post by c2 »

rit wrote: post #16

A lot of people are speculating if Amazon came up with these terms or not. From everything I can find (esp. this article - http://gizmodo.com/5388168/dont-get-too-excited-about-the-no... ) the restrictions on Kindle lending are identical to the ones the Nook has (at least when it rolled out). The B&N site for Nook currently states: Exclusive LendMe™ Technology NOOK's exclusive LendMe™ technology lets you share favori…

Doesn't matter to customers though - most will not do this research themselves (as evidenced by comments in this thread).

Companies like Amazon basically are caught between a rock and a hard place. Either implement the sub-par experience which is what publishers let them (the Nook experience) and have customers complain about your draconian DRM - or don't implement it and have customers complain about not having the features of the Nook.

Considering the Kindle is the market leader in this space, I'm not sure it was the right choice to follow Nook into this space with a sub-par experience. Now the feature and it's limitations are more highly visible, and DRM is front and center on people's minds again.

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#28

Post by allwein »

BBonifield wrote: post #3

It's really too bad that Amazon dropped the ball on this. You get to loan a book once, and the recipient only gets two weeks to read it. What a ridiculous implementation of such a great concept. One of the major things that's kept me away from eBooks is that I can't share them with friends. In the office, we often pass a book around from person to person when we like it, and online lending should be just as simple an…

I'm toying with the idea of getting another Kindle just to user borrowed books from friends.

1. Give them my "Lending Kindle"

2. Have them register it against their account

3. Download the book(s) I want to borrow

4. Turn off wireless

5. They can deregister my Kindle right away and I take my good old time reading the books I borrowed.

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#29

Post by DanielBMarkham »

JunkDNA wrote: post #17

I have recently observed that buying and using ebooks is like being put into a time machine and being forced to re-live the early days of digital music downloads. Do we seriously have to re-learn all those lessons in every single industry that starts to shift to digital content?

I think the answer is yes -- because people who grew up with one business model find it very, very hard to give it up, logic be damned.

I'm at the point now where I have a lot of money invested in my kindle e-books. E-books that Amazon says that they really own and won't let me share with folks (until now)

Wonder how much abuse the average user is going to take before they decide that a book is a book. You buy a book, you read a book, then you give or loan it to somebody else. No amount of DRM and legal contracts in the world is going to change that. It's the common sense and natural way of doing things by billions of people versus the state, custom-made laws, and digital jails.

Same game, different channel.

So yes, we're still going to go down that road.

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