pat loughery

Admittedly I’m a sucker for a good social network, but I’m really not trying to sign up for every new fad that comes along.  Only the good ones.

A few days ago John Chandler brought Lendle to my attention.  Poking around a bit, I like what I see.  

Its basic idea is crowd-sourcing the borrowing and lending of Kindle books, with incentives to be active. Lendle acts as a matchmaker between people who have Kindle books they’re willing to lend, and folks who want to borrow a Kindle edition of a book.  The service is a bit rough (they don’t scrape my Amazon collections account for owned books and I have to enter them manually, for example), but it’s a nifty idea. 

Site signup is free, with a premium tier option.  Borrowing a book is free as long as somebody else in the system has it and has offered to loan it out.  You spend a credit to do so; you earn credits mainly by loaning your own books.  The neat thing is that you earn a small fee each time you lend, and they pay out Amazon gift cards in $10 increments.  I can see the growing over time, and I’ll definitely look here for books if they’re not at the library, or the wait is too long.

The main limitation to the site is not Lendle’s fault, but shared responsibility between Amazon and its publishers.  Not all Kindle books are lendable, and of those that are lendable, most only allow the book to be lent out once (ever).  However, I can see this restriction being eased in the future, and even if it’s not… I am happy to loan out my physical books and borrow physical books, and purchase the ones I really need to keep (or authors I really want to directly support).

The site makes part of its income from Kindle referral fees (clickthrough to buy a book from Amazon and the site owners get a small percentage spiff).  They also make money from advertising and from selling the premium subscriptions.

If you sign up at Lendle, consider using my referral code is AD0ME0U3.  Signing up friends earns me a borrowing credit or two.

After a few days of work with the site, I have a few nitpicks:

1. It would be so nice if Lendle.me could scrape my previously purchased Kindle editions of books.  At the moment, I can’t even find a way to bulk export my Kindle books and strip out thee ASIN (Amazon’s version of ISBN) numbers that Lendle.me needs, so I must go to each book page on Amazon and use the Bookmarklet tool at  http://lendle.me/tools/.  Reading further, it appears that Lendle launched with this feature, but Amazon revoked access to their API and a truce was called, with Lendle disabling the scraper feature.  [Read here]
2. I want to be able to put books onto a wishlist and check them out when I have time to read them, but not necessarily right now.  I found that this is a (and perhaps THE key) feature to the $25/lifetime premium subscription.
3. Once I have 1 and 2, I want Lendle to scrape my Amazon wishlist to bulk import the things on my Wishlist.
4. I want to be able to bulk edit my books to add tags, ratings, quick reviews.  I currently have to do them one by one.
5. I am wavering on this one, but… I *think* I’d like to be able to lend only to my personal friends, not the whole community.  Given the lend-once limitation that many books’ publishers are sticking to, for some of my books I’d like to make sure that lending ends up in my preferred hands.

A couple of nifty surprises that I didn’t expect.   

1. The site introduced Achievements – gamer badges – this past summer.  Achievements are unlocked for doing something that encourages site interaction (e.g. your first book lend, or having N books in a genre, or tagging a bunch of books), and are paid in extra borrowing credits.  Badges are always helpful in socializing a site; I want to spend more time on it to earn those rewards.  Very smart move.
2. The site rewards lenders by paying a small cashback based upon the rarity of the book being lent.  That cashback is paid in $10 increments and as Amazon gift cards.  That’s a fun spiff.  This won’t earn you great riches, but it’s a nice feature.  For your budgeting, I loaned Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet and earned $0.30, then I loaned A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition and earned $0.19.

In thinking through the long-term site arc, here’s the risk I see:  I’m going to want to borrow more books than I am able to lend. Not all of the books that I’ve offered to lend will be interesting to others.  So there may be some decay in site utility to each user over time.  However, if publishers revisit these loaning restrictions, that decay arc gets a lot flatter.

Amazon themselves offer a Kindle book lending service to their Prime customers.  I have yet to use it, but it’s simple – of the books they offer to lend (again not all publishers participate), you can borrow one book per month and keep it as long as you like.

In all, it’s a fun idea.  It doesn’t replace GoodReads or LibraryThing as more general book sites, but it does do the ebook lending thing really well given current business practices.

Sign up at Lendle, and consider using my referral code is AD0ME0U3.  My profile page is at http://lendle.me/users/wayoflife.