Regency Era Thoughts on Free Lending services

A couple days ago this was my post at the bottom of where I reported on 4 things. But I had so little feedback and continue to see writers (not authors) of blogs who post on the unfairness of it all, that I decided to give my thoughts more precedence. The writers with no skin in the game are complaining that this one service was brought down. A service that benefited 15,000 members. Maybe all of those members were not pirates, but it then depends on how you define piracy. If these members, once they discovered that having bought one book, never had to buy another and could go to the site and get books for free, then they were piratical. The writers never see that side of things in their blog posts. They continue to harp that authors abused the process to bring the site down.

That though is not the case. They notified the creator, who may have been too sick to respond quick enough, but the loop hole by which these members who were not friends with each could abuse it showed that the site was a road prone to piracy of copyright work and that is something that the Internet self polices. Here taking the site down is one thing that the Internet did right.

Notes on LendInk, and the free lending of eBooks

I have another friend who found on Facebook that some one in Canada was giving out her books for free. That just does not seem right and with a great deal of effort, Facebook took the site down. Facebook is slow to admit that their system allows the creating of illegal and bogus material of any sort, since of course all you have to do is click a few buttons and type what you want about anything.

I hope all my readers know that I am selling the Brooklyn Bridge for $1400 dollars US if you send it to my Paypal account here…

But seriously, the question of copyright comes up. And then there is LendInk which may have started as a good idea, but it is a corruptible idea surely through no fault of the founder, but of many of the users. The last few days I have seen posts by relatively intelligent writers who have of course, no skin in the game, saying that it is a travesty that LendInk has been put to bed.

That is not so, and I will explain me (Like Ricky in I Love Lucy)

In the days when a book was a book. You may remember it, it was not but a very few years ago. You would pay your $7.99 or whatever and read the book. You had one copy, and then you would have a friend, someone you knew, someone you had talked to more than once for 3.87 seconds. And so you knew what books they might like as well.

Well, you being done with a book, you would offer to lend them a book, or even, should you be rich enough in soul and pocket, give them the book.

I think all authors (and I know I take on a lot when I include all authors) are quite fine with such a model. Then we have LendInk (and other sharing services. I name LendInk since there is a great deal of Internet bits and bytes about it right now), and while the concept may seem alright, I think again most authors have a problem with it. (See I switched things there a little) And that is what LendInk does/did.

They used the idea that we authors had given our okay to lend out the eBooks because, well Amazon made it a condition of offering the book at a reasonable price to readers. So we really had NO CHOICE. Did I say that loud enough for all involved in the controversy. Let me say it again. AMAZON GAVE US NO CHOICE if we were to sell a book to you so that a reader could afford it. Want to sell a book for below $10.00 then you have to allow it to be leant for free.

But then we all believe that you still can lend one of our books that you purchase to your friends. Your friends. People you know for more than 3.87 seconds. People who are really your friends and not those who follow you on Twitter, or friended you meaninglessly on Facebook just to make your little circle bigger.

Quibbling over the definition of friend in the “Social Network” age is meaningless for just as people do know what is good and what is not good, readers will know what a friend is.

So an anonymous site were you let people you have never met know that you bought 5 books for your Kindle and thus can now lend them. You can then borrow from people you have never met, 5 books that you do not have to pay for, and that the author who spent hundreds of hours writing will not get paid for. That is the fallacy of LendInk and similar services. It takes the lending to a friend out of lending and does indeed make this as piracy. A reader only has to have 1 book purchased and then they can put that up to lend and borrow again without ever buying another book.

Is that fair? Whatever business you are in, is that fair? Would these bloggers, presumably being paid through advertising on their blogs like it if the advertisers got together and compared notes and said, that since they placed one ad, they now had the right to swap their ad from site A to the bloggers site, with the person who had bought ads on the bloggers site, and then never pay again? Of course not. But the bloggers who are defending the now defunct site don’t care if a writer gets no money and won’t be able to eat. The blogger will get money and be able to eat and eat more since they can get free reading material at pirating sites. LendInk may not have started out that way, but it is easily abused that way.

But lest you think I am heartless and should deny you reading literature, even great literature, for if the free bottom feeders can’t even afford $.99 for a great many books, they can often get books for free each and every day around the net that authors are giving away. But there is Project Gutenberg that had scores of volunteers who typed word by word the original manuscripts of out of copyright MASTERPIECES and CLASSICS. They have so many books available for free, that a newborn living to a hundred would die before finishing that FREE library.