Clark Howard promoting e-book sharing

Um, you can already loan and borrow books on your nook.

But not everything.

Doesn't this somehow violate terms of use when you download an ebook?

And how does one send a Kindle ebook they downloaded via email?

I've never used a loaning service.

Does this mean the original ebook sent is no longer available to the original owner while it is loaned out? Does it also mean one file listed can only be loaned out once at a time?

If it is creating another file it goes right back to the same attitude of copying ebooks verses paper books is okay. It makes my head hurt and I don't support the sharing of ebooks at this time and until a way is found so one copy remains one copy. I don't see how this can happen with an email.

Kindles and Nooks already let you loan books to friends. The way it works is that for the duration that the book is "loaned" to someone else, it is inaccessible to you, managed by the DRM mechanism on the file. This lets an ebook simulate being a single physical entity that only one person can read at a time. So these lending libraries are extending the idea -- Amazon and B&N probably originally planned for Kindle/Nook owners to lend books to friends in close proximity, but of course it didn't take long for people to realize that online, you can just have everyone post their available books and start trading.

It's not terribly different from PaperbackSwap or BookMooch.

According to the Publisher's Weekly release,

As envisioned, eBookToss.com [sic] will pool users to create an online list of lendable e-books and will facilitate free loans directly between users, entirely contingent on features enabled by e-book providers.

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bolding mine

I created a dummy account and uploaded one to see what it would do. It's currently beta, so while you can set up an account and upload something (only Kindle or Nook) the actual lending functionality doesn't appear to be working yet. I wanna see how closely they hold to the terms allowed by the 'providers'.

Doesn't seem like there's much here, other then perhaps fostering lending between people who don't know each other?

Alitriona said:

Does this mean the original ebook sent is no longer available to the original owner while it is loaned out? Does it also mean one file listed can only be loaned out once at a time?

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On the nook, the original owner cannot access an ebook while it's out on loan. I'm guessing this is what might happen with this service.

Seems much like the Lendle.me service I posted about the other day. I think it's actually a really serious problem for publishers that nobody has quite caught on to yet (except for me, because I am either awesomely prescient or Chicken Little.)

Print lending among friends is one thing - even if we feel it's replacing sales to some extent, we tolerate it happily. Thing is, though, this kind of service potentially makes any book that is enabled for lending available from a total stranger.

Let's say there are a million books currently enabled for lending. You sell one copy of each to each of a million customers; they get together on Lendle or BookFling, and suddenly each of them has access to that whole list of books. You only need to make one book of your own available for sharing to get involved. This strikes me as being almost precisely the BitTorrent protocol.

BenPanced said:

On the nook, the original owner cannot access an ebook while it's out on loan. I'm guessing this is what might happen with this service.

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Thanks for that. I have no issue with sharing as long as there is only one file accessible at one time. I guess we will have to see if that is what is happening here.

What about lending libraries?

Smaddux said:

What about lending libraries?

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What about them?

Torgo said:

Print lending among friends is one thing - even if we feel it's replacing sales to some extent, we tolerate it happily.

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Tolerate it? What? I'm glad the concept of lending is "tolerated." I notice that most every town has an edifice associated with the practice of lending books. Every hear of a public library?

Torgo said:

Thing is, though, this kind of service potentially makes any book that is enabled for lending available from a total stranger.

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Shocking. Public libraries have been lending books to the general public for the last couple of centuries. Shocking, isn't it?

Torgo said:

Let's say there are a million books currently enabled for lending. You sell one copy of each to each of a million customers; they get together on Lendle or BookFling, and suddenly each of them has access to that whole list of books. You only need to make one book of your own available for sharing to get involved. This strikes me as being almost precisely the BitTorrent protocol.

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This has absolutely nothing to do with the "BitTorrent protocol." Actually, there's nothing wrong with the BitTorrent protocol, which has many legitimate uses, such as the distribution of FOSS.

AmericaMadeMe said:

Tolerate it? What? I'm glad the concept of lending is "tolerated." I notice that most every town has an edifice associated with the practice of lending books. Every hear of a public library? Shocking. Public libraries have been lending books to the general public for the last couple of centuries. Shocking, isn't it?

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OK, you've apparently mistaken me for someone who isn't keen on lending, libraries, or BitTorrent, none of which could be further from the truth; although if you hang around here long enough you will hear people say that strictly speaking lending deprives authors of sales (as indeed do secondary markets in books.) But even those people tolerate lending, as of course we should, because there's nothing wrong with it.

You will also hear voices decrying public libraries - the UK is currently faced with the closure of many of them due to savage spending cuts, and I hear people saying libraries are a socialist luxury that ought to be cut back on. (Those people are, as we say in England, gits.) But I have been fighting against those cuts as hard as I can, and will continue to, because libraries? Love 'em. And Brother Mouzone was right.

I'm all for lending, lending libraries, and even ebook lending - despite the fact that my industry is basically lobbying as hard as it can to make it really inconvenient and difficult to borrow an ebook from a library. (This is misguided.) I'm also all for being able to lend books in a P2P way: from my Kindle to your Kindle etc. That sounds like a perfectly reasonable extension of what we can do with print into what we can do with ebooks.

So, we're friends, you and I; we essentially have a shared library. However, I do want to point out that as soon as the internet becomes involved, as in Lendle.me, that latter transaction turns into an entirely different beast. Suddenly the library of sharable titles can leap up in size so that it isn't just limited to what you and I personally own; it becomes the shared library of everyone who owns a Kindle. It's a really simple but I think transformative effect.

AmericaMadeMe said:

This has absolutely nothing to do with the "BitTorrent protocol." Actually, there's nothing wrong with the BitTorrent protocol, which has many legitimate uses, such as the distribution of FOSS.

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Yes, I love BitTorrent too. How else will I get my Linux distros! (Joke! I honestly do love it.) But let's look at how the protocol works, eh, which was the analogy I was drawing? Let us imagine a torrent that describes every book available on Kindle. To me, a site like Lendle seems to work as a notional, hand-cranked tracker for that notional torrent. The only real difference is that each block of data can only be passed around, not copied, but in practice we'll see that popular books will have high enough availability (i.e. multiple copies in circulation) to mean it won't be much of an issue. There's no need for me to be able to download the whole target file when I can grab whichever bit of it I want instantly.

I feel that Amazon will be forced to rethink the way lending works on their device in order to protect their sales, is all. Perhaps restrict it to a 'friends and family' - style list of 20 or so Kindles you can lend to. Perhaps allow it only over Bluetooth (although do Kindles have BT? And I can already see train cars turning into little commuter ebook darknets.) HarperCollins is trying to make ebooks self-destruct after a certain number of shares - good luck with that, heh, heh.

I mean, perhaps someone could point out the flaw in my reasoning, but I think there are unintended consequences here: I am almost certain Amazon didn't intend to turn this feature into a giant P2P public lending library?

(If you'd like to know what my views are on ebook piracy (the answers may surprise you!) I went on and on and on about it on the Neil Gaiman thread over at AW Roundtable.)

Torgo said:

I mean, perhaps someone could point out the flaw in my reasoning, but I think there are unintended consequences here: I am almost certain Amazon didn't intend to turn this feature into a giant P2P public lending library?

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I think you're probably right, and Amazon probably is going to do something to try to put an end to this. But it's not going to work. The more publishers try to control bits, the more people are going to resort to schemes to bypass such control schemes.

The more I look at the endgame, the more I see the writing/publishing business being vastly different in ten or twenty years.

I know that with the Nook you can only lend the book 1 time to 1 person. After that, you lose the ability to (legally) lend the book again. I've also found it's really more of a hassle than it's worth. I do have one friend I lend with fairly often, she lives two houses down :lol:

So there wouldn't be complete unlimited lending, they would still only have the 1 time per book clause. I think.

Amadan said:

I think you're probably right, and Amazon probably is going to do something to try to put an end to this. But it's not going to work. The more publishers try to control bits, the more people are going to resort to schemes to bypass such control schemes.

The more I look at the endgame, the more I see the writing/publishing business being vastly different in ten or twenty years.

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If they're smart about it, hopefully sooner.

...but no industry has been smart about it yet...

Sigh.