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Amazon shuts down Lendle

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Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle

#41

Post by burgerbrain »

rickmb wrote: post #21
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #6

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 co…

> I'm a serious Kindle user -- I have dozens of books. As you've pretty much concluded yourself: no you don't. Which isn't just semantics, it's pretty much the essence of DRM'ed content.

He currently does have them, he just doesn't own them.

In the future, he may no longer have them, but currently he apparently does.

Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle

#42

Post by chc »

apievangelist wrote: post #35
aditya wrote: post #15

This seems to be happening over and over again. Two years ago, everyone wanted to be a platform, now all that embracing open API stuff has turned to shit. Basically, the idea seems to be that once you've used your API ecosystem to grow to a certain size, you can fuck over the developers that allowed you to get to that point by building on top of your platform and by attracting users to it or keeping them engaged. The…

API ecosystem poaching is definitely uncool. Twitters recent moves are disturbing and definitely will have a negative impact on how people view APIs. The bad decisions by Twitter doesn't mean everything is going to shit. Amazon is building their ecosystem with consideration of their ecosystem players - http://www.cloudave.com/10992/aws-vpc-and-impact-on-ecosyste... NPR is retooling their APIs to support partner effor…

If you read the headline, you will notice that this comment thread is about Amazon screwing over their API users. Twitter was just brought up for context. So bringing up Amazon as somebody "innovating and sharing their stories" without addressing how they treated Lendle users is more than a little bit silly.

Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle

#43

Post by notahacker »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #6

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 co…

"Heading down the same road as the music industry" seems a bit strong. They haven't sent out armies of lawyers to extort kids in project downloading picture books, or asked Homeland Security to seize URLs

They've simply decided that a site probably shouldn't be using Amazon's own resources via the API to make it easy to find a particular Kindle title they might have been considering buying for free. If Amazon perceive it as damaging to sales they'd be insane not to. Noticeably there's a similar site that hasn't been shut down; maybe that one generates decent revenue via links to purchase books they don't have available.

Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle

#44

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Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle

#45

Post by cicero »

danilocampos wrote: post #8
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #6

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 co…

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.

iBooks is very slow on my iPhone 3G, but the Kindle app, though not as pretty, runs fine.

Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle

#46

Post by btucker »

awj wrote: post #36
btucker wrote: post #11

Amazon must be counting their blessings there wasn't a way for people to borrow & lend physical books or else there's no way they could have built a business around selling them!

I didn't know there was a website where I could borrow and lend physical books to random people across the world with the click of a button, absolutely no shipping fees, and a rock-solid 14 day return policy. Does that site exist, or are you exploiting the (obviously false) "ebooks are books" train of thought for a pithy comment?

World-wide you might be right. But in the US for about the last 30 years you can borrow any book you want 100% free straight from your computer (albeit usually with a 2-3 day wait) thanks to the magic of inter-library loan.

Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle

#48

Post by jmspring »

jschuur wrote: post #24
danilocampos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have to agree with Danil. I like the page turning behavior in iBooks better, but not enough to crack my books.

I prefer the experience within Stanza to either iBooks or Kindle -- ability to resize, page turning, etc.

That said, there is a big difference between the "apps" and they Kindle device itself.

Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle

#49

Post by patio11 »

The Lendle team has their take on the matter here:

http://lendle.me/amazon-api-revocation/

Quote: Our initial reaction was one of pure surprise.

Me, not so much:

Lending ebooks is a feature demanded mostly by people who don't pay money for ebooks (and don't pay money for movies, music, or videogames if they can possibly avoid it) and will not be induced to pay money by the feature.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1821923

The only use of the service is to turn one purchase of any popular book into the ability to read as many as 26 books per year free. Its essentially the classic music startup model: you don't want to pay money for music, we want to make that happen. Of course it got negative attention.

Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle

#50

Post by mryall »

mbrubeck wrote: post #28

Time to trot out the Jeff Bezos quote again, from when authors were complaining about Amazon allowing used book sales: "When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this." http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1291

It's pretty clear that he was talking about physical books. E-books that have no limits on distribution are affected by different economic forces. In this situation, what rights the purchaser has or should have are far less clear.
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