Amazon pulls Lendle’s plug
p2pnet view P2P:- “Lendle, like other ebook lending sites, makes it possible for Kindle ebook readers in the US to lend out their ebooks to another member of the site – on a single occasion and for a limited time period of 14 days – and be permitted to borrow someone else’s ebook for free in exchange.”
Awful, eh?
Makes one think of that e-library which objects to having to buy books once again after they’ve been loaned to 26 readers.
But this is Amazon, doing an Apple, which routinely defecates on its own customers and sites which support it.
The quote in the intro comes from a Guardian story.
States co-founder Jeff Croft in an open letter >>>
Lendle relies heavily on Amazon’s API, so this effectively shut the site down. The letter we received from Amazon states that the reason our API and Amazon Associates accounts have been revoked is that Lendle does not “serve the principal purpose of driving sales of products and services on the Amazon site.”
We take issue with this, as Lendle was built from the ground up to ensure that it would be beneficial to authors, publishers, and Amazon. Our site requires that you be willing to lend books before you can borrow them. We even went so far as to allow users to sync their Lendle accounts with their Kindle accounts, so that we could ensure anyone who borrows books on Lendle has previously purchased lendable books from Amazon. Our philosophy is: You can’t borrow if you don’t lend, and you can’t lend if you don’t buy.
The entire system we built is centered around the idea of encouraging people to buy books. As a published author, it was very important to me personally to build the system in a way that was good for authors and publishers.
The letter we got from Amazon comes from a “no-reply” e-mail address and offers no formal way to dispute the revocation, or ask for more clarity. We have sent a response to any relevant Amazon e-mail address we could find, but as yet, have not received any response from them.
Our initial reaction was one of pure surprise. I work out of my home office just blocks from Amazon headquarters in Seattle, and am very involved in the tech community here in town. As such, I know many people at Amazon, and everything I’d heard was that most inside Amazon were big fans of Lendle—even up to higher-ranking managers.
We’re not sure why this action comes now. We’ve been operating for a month and a half now, with no complaints from Amazon. We didn’t make any significant changes to the site over the past couple of weeks that would have resulted in any kind of change in our compliance with Amazon’s terms. We do know that we’re not the only eBook lending site who had their API access revoked today, so we can only speculate that it wasn’t anything about Lendle specifically that caused Amazon to act today, but rather something a bit bigger than us. We know publishers have been skittish about lending, and aren’t yet seeing how much value it brings them, so we might speculate Amazon was acting on pressure from them. But really, we don’t know. We can only speculate.
Over the six weeks or so that Lendle has been running, we’ve been thrilled to engage with a passionate, loyal, and vocal community many, many thousands of book-lovers strong. We intend to do everything in our power to continue to serve our amazing community. Part of that, of course, is doing whatever we can do get our API access back. Failing that, it’s still very possible for us to run a lending site without relying on Amazon’s APIs.
“It may take us a bit of time to rebuild, but one way or another, we’ll continue lending eBooks”, adds Croft.
(Cheers, Marc)
once again – HarperCollins bans its own e-books, March 5, 2011
Guardian – Ebook lending website Lendle shut down by Amazon, March 22, 2011
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
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