First off, I support LendInk and think these authors behaved like children. Heck, I was outraged I even blogged about it.
However, I'd like to play devil's advocate for a moment. A few weeks ago, the Ryan Holiday fiasco went public. If you don't remember this, he was the guy who lied his way into coverage in mainstream media (ie - ABC, MSNBC, the New York Times, etc.) This was a situation where journalists didn't check their own facts (in this case, they didn't vet their expert) and they printed lies.
A few months ago, ABC tweeted that Hosni Mubarak had died. Turns out he was still alive (and it took journalists about twenty minutes to figure that out).
Journalists are in the business of fact checking, yet they've been caught many, many times unknowingly spreading hoaxes. Social media is incredibly powerful (now), but it will become useless if we don't teach civilians how to check their facts before they start lynch mobs.
Anyone have any ideas how we can guide users towards showing some restraint in similar situations?
Well, they don't want to show any restraint, AFAIK. The saga of clueless/greedy/whatever authors against technology is much larger than this particular case, e.g. just two days ago it was reported that the Author's Guild is seeking $2B from Google for book scanning and making snippets available, that's $750 for each book! Many authors back these efforts.
My (optimistic) feeling is that a small circle of businesses is brainwashing the authors, citing music piracy and the "success" of RIAA in suing pirates and the authors are taking the bait.
Most books don't break even. Also, many books scanned by google are not easily available, out of print, or out of copyright, so I would be very surprised if google is costing authors anything like $750 per book. In fact I would suspect, if anything, it will help drive book sales.
The other thing that crossed my mind is that Google is still making use of the books - I doubt that just making them available publicly is part of their plan. If they're also licensing them for spelling correction and translation, how does that affect the pricing?
They could have started with the name. The service they were providing was really all about matching people together to lend books to one another. They didn't actually do any lending. But the name LendInk could definitely be interpreted to mean that they, in fact, lent ink.
It's a small thing, and may not have mattered, but names carry a lot of power.
Presumably the authors that got lendink taken down are the same ones that hate libraries and used bookstores, and complain about lost sales. It's unfortunate that there are such authors, but what can you do?
I'm not sure, besides posting a giant "WE'RE REALLY NOT PIRATES, HERE'S WHY: (link)" at the top of your page, but then it might be a "doth protest too much" sort of turn-off to potential users.
I've never used LendInk (or any other e-book lending sites), but they could have a "For Authors" section prominently visible on the site, telling the authors why their work may be on the site, what they can do (it probably doesn't hurt to comply with take-down requests), and why it is to their benefit (I hope) that their work is shared with others in a platform-supported fashion.
>it probably doesn't hurt to comply with take-down requests //
That would look like some notional acceptance that they were doing something illicit whereas they were merely providing, it seems, a matching service for people wanting to legally lend books to one another.
Where's the RoI for complying with false take down notices?
You can fight it to a point, but that just ruffles everyone's feathers.
As stated elsewhere along this topic, sometimes author's have a moral viewpoint that lending books to complete strangers using the internet violates the spirit of the feature. Look at it from their point of view - they want readers' family and friends to benefit from the lend, but not the wider internet.
Sure, there isn't anything legally wrong with lending books to complete strangers, but working with the author and respecting their wishes can (maybe) generate goodwill that could have avoided getting LendInk taken down in the first place. That said, I don't operate an e-book lending site, so I may be way off base here. Considering that many authors wanted LendInk taken down (and later apologized for it), that's certainly possible.
Anyways, at a minimum, you could provide them with a direct link to their book's admin page on Amazon (if that's possible), instructing them how to disable the lending feature, re-iterating that you'll of course remove their book from the site when they do so.
Thinking about the other side of this for a moment, it does seem pretty obvious that LendInk changed the situation the authors thought they were getting into when they agreed to make their books lendable.
Given that, it's not surprising their first reaction is anger. Perhaps not rational, but humans are not inherently rational beings.
The authors thought "Lend my book to a friend? Sure, why not? Good word of mouth always helps!" A nice, forward thinking perspective.
But what LendInk makes possible is for lending to extend beyond normal social connections. You could go look for any book you wanted, never buy another book again. And each book would be lent the maximum number of times. There's a fundamental difference at work there, the dynamic changes considerably.
You could say "Well libraries work the same way! Buy once, lend forever!" But libraries are geographically constrained. And there are a lot of them. So being able to be lent anywhere in the country still means you sold a lot of books. It's fundamentally different.
So while this site certainly didn't promote piracy and authors were compensated when appropriate, it did subvert the terms they had agreed to, and it did so willfully.
I can see where the content creators are coming from there.
This is probably a good idea, and probably inevitable and unstoppable. But that doesn't mean it has to be on the same economic terms as the previous model.
But those lendable books could only be lent once, right?
So if you buy a book that's lendable you'd be able to "trade" your lend for someone else's lend. At best you're only getting one free read for every purchase.
That's a far cry better than some people I know who only read books they borrow from friends. Which, in meatspace, you can lend an infinite number of times.
"Which, in meatspace, you can lend an infinite number of times."
Well, no, because in meatspace you have a more limited social circle. Few people would lend a physical book to a complete stranger, or if they did, would know they'd probably never get it back. Plus of course time is a limitation, and if a borrower is not local, there's the time of transit back and forth, which doesn't exist for an e-book.
And as a practical matter, it is pretty unlikely that you'd be able to find a borrower for every one of your physical books. But that would be possible with e-books, given a way to lend them to strangers, because of the way the site can match borrowers to lenders.
I guarantee you that I have a book I have loaned out more than once.. a couple times, in fact. Amazon only lets you lend it once, for up to a maximum of, what, 2 weeks?
In meatspace I can sell my book to a friend... or give it away.
Why is it that with ebooks some authors feel enititled to a sale for each and every person who wants to read their book? That is never how books worked in the past.
I thought all this information technology would liberate information, not restrict it to such an extent.
You say that a site allowing lenders to be matched to borrows would... what? You can only loan each book once.
I think there's a bit of a "disillusionment factor" at play here.
Content producers thought the digital world would remove distribution costs while maintaing the same per-unit price and increasing number of sales, hence multiplying profits. They didn't understand how distribution costs would disappear for consumers as well, making "original copies" indistinguishable from "second hand".
Now they're starting to understand, and they think (or have been told by "old media" companies) that this will put pressure on price-per-unit, people will "steal" it and sales will collapse, and they'll all go broke. Hence the constant outrage.
Old internet geeks, by now, know chapter and verse about the need for new business models, the reality of p2p actually growing the market as a whole etc etc; but these people don't, they're like Metallica circa 1998. Most of them don't even make much money; talking to them about new business models is like trying to convince your average "bodega" shopkeeper that he should think about advertising in the NYTimes or on TV.
"You say that a site allowing lenders to be matched to borrows would... what? You can only loan each book once."
Yes, but everyone with that ebook can lend it once. Matching sites like the one under discussion make it more likely that an ebook will be lent, than would be the case if the customer were just lending to friends (I know I have books that are of no interest to any of my friends, so without a matching service, I would never lend them to anyone.)
I don't think too many of the authors actually held the position you describe. You describe a situation where authors understood LendInk and didn't like the way it changed lending, but if you read the complaints from authors that accused LendInk of piracy, it's pretty clear the authors didn't understand what LendInk was doing and just reacted from a position of ignorance rather than informing themselves.
There is one author who is complaining on the LendInk FB page who seemed a bit clued in. She was objecting to the fact that the site allowed you to lend books to anyone and not just your friends and family like defined on the Kindle Lending page on Amazon.
She didn't like it because if Amazon allowed a lending service to match up anyone who wanted to lend on the Amazon site then she expects she should be getting paid royalty rates like libraries have to pay to lend to anyone.
In the UK there is an inter-library lending system, so if your local library doesn't have a book they'll borrow it from one that has.
You never hear authors railing against libraries, even though (in the UK) very many more books are read via libraries than bought new. But publishers, especially in the US, are vigorous about lending ebooks.
This sort of thing always confuses me. If I were an indie author, I would want my book to be as widely read as possible. If I got more money upfront in exchange for what amounts to free advertising ("jrockway? never heard of him. but sure, I'll read his book for free."), I'd call that a pretty good deal. But I guess someone heard the word "free" and thought it would be a good idea to prevent any transaction that doesn't generate new money...
There are site viruses that serve up normal content to normal users, and so go undetected, but serve up spam like that only to GoogleBot, since they're designed to affect PageRank etc. of specific sites.
It might have been advertisements, and Google didn't save style information, so it's a lot more visible in the cached version than it was in the live version.
This is a poor article. Who shut it down? The ISP? In response to complaints from whom? Amazon? This is what goes in the first paragraph, not buried in the middle of paragraph nine.
> "At this time, the host company is only advising that they have received hundreds of threats regarding possible lawsuits if they did not take Lendink.com down immediately. I do not know personally if it was a result of authors, publishers, Amazon or other rights holders. I have not personally been in contact with anyone other thaan the host company. I do however have a certified letter awaiting my pickup at the post office which is from a company called Noble Romance."
and
>"The hosting company has offered to reinstate Lendink.com on the condition that I personally respond to all of the complaints individually. I have to say, I really do not know if it is worth the effort at this point. I have read the comments many of these people have posted and I don't think any form of communication will resolve the issues in their eyes. Most are only interested in getting money from me and others are only in in for the kill. They have no intentions of talking to me or working this out. So much for trying to start a business and live the American Dream."
Given that it rants about people coming to conclusions based on scant evidence, it's more than a little ironic that it comes to a lot of conclusions based on scant evidence.
I tried my best to defend this site. I was in the thick of it with many of the authors that frankly were quite simply, technically challenged as to how the site would work.
I was in the accusation threads on Kindleboards ..
You can see a lot of the back and forth there. It was really spiraling out of control. So much so, it was ripe for disruption (it likely still is) as many of the authors were (and are) looking for methods to have essentially DMCA takedown notices on cruise control.
(seriously, there seems to be a big market for this amongst the indie authors that don't have a handle on some of the more technical and copyright issues at hand. ps. if anyone wants to know more or talk through ideas, reach out.)
Anyway, I put forth quite a bit about how the whole Amazon associate world works (in plain terms) and how other sites, that have been around much longer and were MUCH bigger (no offense LendInk) such as lendle.me (which if memory serves had their site name challenged because they got on the amazon radar back in the day).
I dunno.. I was pretty amazed to see how quickly it all unfolded and how others jumped on board without a full understanding of how the site functions worked.
Sorry to hear about the whole situation. I have a site in the same space (but not lending) and its unfortunate to see the door closed on what could be a very good (and profitable) promotional engine for both the site and the book authors.
EDIT : a bit more of the backstory
I can add something valuable from being a part of the thread. A big problem for some of the early authors was that their books were NOT available to be lent (as per author -- I didn't verify).
ASSUMING this was accurate of some of the initial outraged authors and not the "hey get my book down" others that came along in time, I put forth the idea in multiple threads that perhaps the devs of the site got too much data in a sweep via the API.
In other words, they didn't bother to get books that were available to be loaned. And, did just a big sweep across the Amazon API looking for any and all Kindle books.
Somewhat makes sense -- the more books, the more opportunity for affiliate tag clicks. And, it probably errors out (or did) saying this book is not eligible. I believe an author even confirmed this early on.
It was this simple oversight that REALLY added the fuel to the fire.
Hope that gives some additional insight to those that weren't part of the madness.
"Oh, hey, I was one of the ones who attacked you, your site, host, business.
You got shut down, even though you did nothing wrong… Sorry."
I'm paraphrasing, but that was pretty much it. No regret, no "what can I do to help?", "I'll try to correct the disinformation I spread", just a literal "I'm sorry." The end.
Its important to remember that there is nothing wrong with lending someone your digital book, the same as lending your physical book. You don't need the author, vendor, or any third party intermediary to authorize you. If any party attempts to use DRM to infringe your moral rights, it is morally right to break that DRM, law be damned.
If a person writes a book, and a publisher prints and sells a ton of copies of it without giving any of the money to the writer, that doesn't seem to be moral. Even if it is moral, it doesn't incentivize people to try making a living at writing, since they will rarely be able to compete with big publishers. So: if we let authors claim copyright, and force publishers to come to terms with the authors for an acceptable royalty, then in general there will be more authors. If we balance copyrights correctly, our society = will take some damage from skewing "property" to include "intellectual property", but it should be smaller than the total good of having more authors.
While it sucks that any legitimate site had to go through this, I'm it was LendInk and not Lendle.me that got the brunt of this. I have a bunch of lend credits on the latter, but have never used the former.
An alternative way to look at it: When you use technology to do things in ways your content producers don't understand, they respect technology less. Eventually, they fight back, even if the technology does improve their situation.
Lesson? Make sure you explain how your technology works to the people who are providing your content. They are the ones you need to convince, because if you can bag them, they will become your biggest supporters and users.
There was a FAQ that explained in detail how the site worked. According to the site owner, most of the people who read it were no longer angry. Apparently almost none of the people sending hate mail to his web host even bothered to visit the site, they were just going by stuff they read on facebook.
Exactly. A rational defence works in courtrooms but is largely useless against angry mobs. If people are angry at you before they even meet you, there is not a terrible lot you can really be expected to do. Not without an advertising budget anyway.
Communication is not limited to simply laying out facts in FAQs. There are more effective ways to communicate quickly and cleanly what you do, calm folks down, then explain the details.
An FAQ is great for technically-minded people. But most authors are not technically minded people.
Lendink needed to have a dedicated page or section, for authors, telling them what they were doing (in layman's terms, not exact terms) and how the authors would benefit, and how the authors could opt out (i.e., link to Amazon's page on opting-out of lending, if such is possible for self-published books).
The greatest weakness of 99% of website/SAAS startups is that they don't realize that their target market may not have the technical skills to do much more than turn on the computer and navigate to gmail/hotmail.
The point of a FAQ is to explain things in simple terms! OK since the page is no longer live I'll paste the fulltext from the Google cache. http://pastebin.com/egg9vcmi
When technology inventors have to explain themselves to content producers in order to not have their product killed, something has gone horribly wrong with the world.
I certainly agree with your second statement, that getting content producers on your side can give you strong supporters and users, but that should only represent a marketing/growth issue, not an existential threat.
> When technology inventors have to explain themselves to content producers in order to not have their product killed, something has gone horribly wrong with the world.
Not if those technology "inventors" want to make money from said content.
There was a blog post about Spotify by a musician which compared the figures, and IIRC Spotify's royalties were like 100 or 1000 times less, so yes, there's a significant difference.
That's a completely different system where Amazon themselves "lends" the book to Prime members only. LendInk allowed people who bought Kindle books to connect with people with which they could use their "lend to anyone you like" feature, which is included as part of the "purchase" of the Kindle book.
In some cases, Amazon went as far as to simply buy a copy at full price and then only give access for the regular lending period to promote the Kindle Lending Library, but that was only for high profile books like The Hunger Games where they couldn't strong-arm the book publisher to agree to better terms. If this doesn't sound like it makes sense, think of it as a loss-leader for Amazon Prime for Kindle (device) owners.
Thanks for explaining this scenario. Is there no other scenario where an indie author would receive compensation for lends of their books facilitated by LendInk?
An Amazon KDP published indie author would only gain possible exposure through this system, and never direct compensation. That said, as an indie author I like the idea of LendInk and would be happy if people were buying my novel and then sharing it there: it would mean there was interest in the book and it would mean reaching more readers who would potentially seek out more of my novels and become potential future customers. I actively gave away hundreds of digital copies of my novel over a 24 hour period to gain exposure, so I have no beef with a site like LendInk.
However, I'd like to play devil's advocate for a moment. A few weeks ago, the Ryan Holiday fiasco went public. If you don't remember this, he was the guy who lied his way into coverage in mainstream media (ie - ABC, MSNBC, the New York Times, etc.) This was a situation where journalists didn't check their own facts (in this case, they didn't vet their expert) and they printed lies.
A few months ago, ABC tweeted that Hosni Mubarak had died. Turns out he was still alive (and it took journalists about twenty minutes to figure that out).
Journalists are in the business of fact checking, yet they've been caught many, many times unknowingly spreading hoaxes. Social media is incredibly powerful (now), but it will become useless if we don't teach civilians how to check their facts before they start lynch mobs.
Anyone have any ideas how we can guide users towards showing some restraint in similar situations?