Exchanging Kindle books with Lendle
Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if there were a way for people to share digital books? It would be cost-effective to be able to have a title read by more than one household, and there’s something inherently democratic about sharing information and building knowledge, isn’t there? But what would we call that?
Not a library, because they don’t have the licensing necessary to do Kindle loans …but … oh yeah. Lendle.
Lendle is built on the premise that people want to share books digitally as much as they swap them in paper format via libraries and informal book exchanges and might be willing to make digital swaps with people they don’t know. It might be worth giving Lendle a look. What can libraries learn from the Lendle model of social networking to exchange titles?
PS - I wrote this entry ahead of time, before the HarperCollins/OverDrive debate began. How does a program like Lendle fit into that brouhaha? I’m not sure.
March 6th, 2011 at 1:02 pm
I’m one of the founders of http://lendle.me. We appreciate the write-up! (I arrived via a tweet link.)
Regarding the HarperCollins/OverDrive debate, we’re definitely a different lending model in that we rely primarily on crowd-sourcing for our lends. We also deal exclusively with the Kindle platform which, if I’m not mistaken, is excluded from OverDrive as a result of format differences.
With that said, we’re facing similar obstacles. The vast majority of the “negative” feedback we receive is related to Amazon’s lend restrictions (only 1 lend per lendable book, no lending outside the US, some books aren’t lendable at all) and those, in turn, are restrictions imposed by publishers. Sometimes I’m shocked that no one seems to have learned any lessons from the music industry and its growing pains with digital music.
Our hope is that more and more publishers will begin to see the value in expanded lending options. First and foremost: We sell a lot of books, even though we’re a lending solution.
After all, people can’t lend books they haven’t paid for. This is an amazing opportunity for publishers, and they appear to be too nervous (out-of-touch?) to seize it.
(Just as an aside, my wife Carolyn — who’s nearing completion of her Library Sciences degree — came up with the idea for Lendle. Librarians in general seem to really love the idea.)