It's a simple and concept that works surprisingly well. I've borrowed 2 books so far: The Grid: A Modular System for the Design and Production of Newpapers, Magazines, and Books
and MetaGame
. The first book turned out to be nothing like what I was expecting, but I also was just curious what kind of content a $40 digital book would have in it. Turns out to be a bunch of too-small pictures and very poorly formatted text. The second book I really liked, and I'll have a real book review up shortly.
and MetaGame. The first book turned out to be nothing like what I was expecting, but I also was just curious what kind of content a $40 digital book would have in it. Turns out to be a bunch of too-small pictures and very poorly formatted text. The second book I really liked, and I'll have a real book review up shortly.What pains me the most about the service (which is really the discussion that Lendle is trying to provoke) is the very poor state of DRM on these digital books.
Unlike traditional libraries, where a book can be lent over and over so that the literature may benefit and entertain us all, Amazon only allows Kindle books to be lent once. At first, I thought this was a misunderstanding. I thought that it meant I could only loan to one person at a time, which mimicked physical lending perfectly. But no, once a book is lent, it cannot be lent again. It's as if the only way you're allowed to take books out of the library is if they're on fire. A slow-burning fire that takes about 2 weeks to thoroughly destroy the books you've borrowed, but a fire nevertheless.
That's just for the books that can be lent. Over half of the books that I own can't be shared. That's just downright pathetic. I can't let others enjoy the brilliance of the Mass Effect series or the excitement of The Lost Symbol. There's absolutely no technological reason why these books can't be shared; the publishers are afraid sharing will cost them money. Greed is a terrible reason to make so many people unhappy.
I hate these kinds of problems. Technical problems just require some smart people to think really hard until they come up with a solution that works. This is a social problem that requires enough negative feedback to be heard for the folks in charge to do something about it. And that takes an immense amount of time and effort that simply wouldn't be needed if the folks in charge knew what the people wanted.
In short, Lendle makes a the best of a fairly bad situation. I'll probably still buy Kindle books, but I'll be on the lookout for self-published works and publishers who at the very least allow lending. And I can only hope that Amazon will only push publishers harder to allowing a more open sharing model that functions more like physical books, and less like books on fire.
4 comments:
Publishers would definitely lose money and would pass their losses off to the authors. So the issue to me is, how do you propose to compensate the authors? Would you be happy with a minimal charge for 'borrowing'? Like $1 per book?
I don't think they would lose money. I've paid for things that were given away for free: e-books, indie games, digital music. I paid because I liked what I got out of 'em and I wanted to encourage their creators to make more of 'em.
And in all these cases, I got fully functioning copy that I could duplicate and share around without DRM. I'm not even asking that for Kindle books. I'm fine with only owning one digital copy of a book that I can't read when I share it with someone else. But digital should never be harder to share than analog.
I should be clear- I am for sharing and anti-DRM on principle. I agree that digital should be easier to share than analog.
I just disagree with your assertion that publishers are not allowing full digital sharing because of pure greed.
If I was an author, and knew that you were sharing my work with 100s or 1000s of people, and say, 1% of them will end up buying a copy for themselves... not sure how I would feel about that.
The library analogy is nice, but not quite fair. A single book at the library may be read by say, 10-20 patrons a year. Your app would would share a digital book instantly with 100s of people.
I'm a heavy library user, and after enjoying a book, CD, or DVD... I've probably ended up buying a copy less than 1% of the time.
If you give people the choice for free and make it super easy, I think they would be more like me.
I'll soften my statement. I can't honestly claim to know why publishers won't allow the sharing of e-books as much as the sharing of physical books. My suspicion is greed, but it might also be fear of technology, incompetence, or just plain ignorance.
But if I were a published author, I'd be super excited about thousands reading my book. Sure, I'd hope they all paid for it, but more than that I want them to read it, like it, talk about it, and recommend it to friends. For those who buy it, I'l gain royalties. For those who share it, I'll gain marketing & publicity, which would hopefully lead to more folks buying my book.
I also don't think the real numbers would be as dire as 1% of readers buying the book. I have no real evidence to say one way or the other, though. But even 50% feels low to me.
To be clear, the sharing I want to enable is identical to physical book sharing. If I loan you a book, I can't read it until you give it back. So I'm not really enabling hundreds of people to instantly read my book by only purchasing it once.
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