Lending a Book to a Friend with the Kindle (or How Kindle Harms Virality)
If I buy a book on the Kindle, can I lend it to a friend? My understanding is that I cannot. (Well, I could lend my whole Kindle, but not just the book.)
If I were an author, I’m not sure I would like this because it eliminates the viral nature of books. As an author, or any content creator, there is a lot of value in virality. To simply have your name “out there” as a meme in the a community, hive or culture has a lot of value–as part of the conversation at a cocktail party, so to speak.
Think of this case: have you ever been lent a book that you enjoyed reading, then suggested to someone else that they read the book? I have. In other words, I became an evangelist for the author. I think this is worth as much, if not more, than few dollars they would have earned from the book.
Or, what about books checked out from the library?
And, second-hand bookstores. In a pure sense, the author not the seller, should be earning the dollars when a book is resold. However, Mr. Market factors that loss into the original price of the book. In other words, pricing has reached an equilibrium taking into account the viral benefits of the secondary market.
There are lots of technical ways Kindle could solve this problem, but let me suggest just one. It’s not the best solution, but it’s easy: for each Kindle book that I buy and download I get to “share it” with exactly one other person.
From an implementation point of view, the act of “sharing” is simply by giving a unique promo code to a friend. The code can be used only once and only for a specific book. Online promo codes are well established, so this shouldn’t be hard. And, there are many easy ways that they could be shared from device-to-device, by e-mail, etc.
Anyhow, all I’m saying is that there’s a lot of value to viralty. This about it this way: in a perfect world, content creators would get paid each time their work is used. However, just because they’re not getting paid cash doesn’t mean they’re not getting value from their work.
Have you ever read any of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels? The third in the series, “The Well of Lost Plots,” captures these troubling issues rather well although it was published a few years before the Kindle was released. Incidentally this is also a series I’ve recommended and loaned out to a number of friends.
Lorraine
10 Oct 09 at 11:58 am
My wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, and one or two of their friends lend books to each other all the time. eBook readers will have to accommodate this practice if they expect to succeed in this reading market place.
I don’t think the copyright on a book anywhere prevents it from being read by more than one reader?
Mike
Mike
23 Nov 09 at 9:23 am
I’ll admit it, as much as I love gadgets, I was hesitant about digital reading. Then two things happened: I got involved in the green movement and my book OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS was available on Kindle (OK. So one persuaded me more than the other!)
Got the Kindle, started charging the battery and VOILA! Not only did it know who I was (Amazon thoughtfully programmed it at their end so it had my name, e-mail address, etc.) but it took all of sixty seconds to figure out how to call up a title, navigate to the next page, change the font size, etc. Talk about painless!
Will it take some getting use to before I can read an entire novel? Perhaps. The screen resolution is crisp and clear (even under harsh office lighting) and the unit is so tissue paper thin that you don’t have to worry about holding a heavy or clumsy paperback. Improvements? Well, as mentioned by many others a memory slot would be nice and a color screen would make it perfect (remember: it gets periodicals from most major papers – many of whom use color photos).
So, if you were hesitant, don’t be shy. It is user friendly, set up is practically done for you before you open the box and it’s fun!
SkylarkSD
13 Dec 09 at 6:39 pm
I just read your article because I was just googling the idea of lending books on a Kindle. The implementation would be easy, since all books are tracked on the Amazon account and you need one to use the Kindle.
All it would take was the option “lend book”. If you enter the Amazon account name, the book could be disabled on your account (with the note that it’s lended to soandso). And it could be activated to the other person with the note “borrowed from soandso”. Both could have the option to end the lending.
In this way it would not be duplicating books and it would resemble the practice of lending real books that you can’t read when you borrowed it to someone. Therefor there would still be reason enough to buy the book. Amazon could even add a buy option to a lended book, that would then automatically return the lended license to the owner.
What do you think?
Dominique Pfeiffer
11 Jan 10 at 9:18 am
Great post thx!
Tyson F. Gautreaux
29 Mar 10 at 4:05 pm
I actually enjoyed reading through this write-up.Many thanks.
Ouida Forgione
28 Apr 10 at 4:42 am
dominique, I think your idea is wonderful
linda
3 Jul 10 at 5:27 am
Interesting reading on this subject as I soooo want to have an answer before I buy (maby three Kindles – 1 for me, 1 for partner and 1 for son) as we are avid readers and (mainly) have similar reading tastes. Can we share the same ebooks at the same time or not at the same time or not at all. This is not clear from the siries of posts.
JohnOz
8 Aug 10 at 6:25 pm
I don’t actually own a Kindle, so I don’t know the answer to that question.
scottporad
9 Aug 10 at 8:56 am
@JohnOz…as of right now Kindle apparently doesn’t allow book sharing but the B&N Nook does. I’m torn as I’m about to enter the e-reader market and I really like many of the features on the Kindle BUT it apparently doesn’t have a SD card slot and it doesn’t allow lending.
Guess I’ll sit on my hands a couple more weeks and see if the upgraded Kindle coming out this month has incorporated these things. Otherwise I guess I’m into buying 2 Nooks for me and a friend.
Sherrie
18 Aug 10 at 5:04 am
Great post, thanks. I am just getting into the whole e-book thing, so I’m not an expert, but the way I see it, Kindle does allow you to link more than one reading device to your account. At the moment I read a book that I bought from them parallel on my Kindle for PC and Kindle for Android. When I buy an actual reading device and register it under my Amazon account, the book will be readable there as well. So I see no problem at all in getting a bunch of Kindle e-readers, registering them all under the same account and handing them over to different members of my family. I do not think that would be a violation of any moral or legal terms.
That will not, however, solve the issue of lending out a book in a good oldfashioned way.
Urmas
4 Nov 10 at 12:19 am
books online are great, wether they are e-books or conventional hardbound and paperback books *~.
Light Fittings
24 Nov 10 at 12:07 pm
@ Jon Oz…Register all 3 kindles to one user and the content is available on all three devices.
Jennfactor
26 Nov 10 at 2:47 pm
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Aldrich
12 Sep 11 at 9:53 am