Quote:
Originally Posted by Albright
I think most of us would be happy with something significantly less than unrestricted lending. Maybe we can only lend it to the same account once, and/or maybe we have to wait a reasonable period of time once between lending. But making it so we can only lend a book once, ever, somehow feels even more draconian than the current situation where we can't lend books at all.
From another perspective; public and private libraries and paper book sharing between friends and co-workers has not yet decimated the paper book industry after several centuries.
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Library use and p-book sharing both have a certain...'effort threshold,' if you will. We are surrounded by people who don't use libraries because you have to get a card, or trudge or drive
allllll the way over to the library, and then worry about returning the books on time, which would cost you money, &c. When borrowing paper books, your friend has to remember to lend it to you, or you have to remind them, and you have to remember to return it sometime, or be reminded. This doesn't seem like a lot of effort to me, but I have friends who wouldn't bother with half as much 'work' just to read a book.
Despite claims that
Home Taping Is Killing Music, people were still buying music en masse until it became sufficiently easy to not buy it. Even with high speed dubbing on tape decks (man, I'm old), there was a time investment on the part of the sharer and, regardless of how the content was shared (hand to hand or by post), there was some coordination and/or effort involved. You would never have seen thousands upon thousands of people who didn't pay for an album listening to it on their commute the day it was released. Not so now; it's just so much easier. And it
has done damage to the recording industry. Some segments of it have adapted better than others, and some are doing better than they were before this all happened, but it took a while.
With the Kindle, no matter how lending is handled, it's likely to be considerably easier (both technically and in the sense that you don't have to leave your seat), which will instantly increase the number of lenders. If, as has been suggested, this is just a first step towards figuring out a good model for lending that works for Amazon, publishers, and readers, it's definitely too soon to be claiming human rights violations (obviously I exaggerate, but look at some of the replies in this thread); this is uncharted territory (even though B&N did it first, it's still too soon to tell), and we should let the dust settle – it hasn't even really been kicked up yet – and see how things look in six months, a year, or more. With a precedent like that set in the music industry, who can blame anyone in the business of selling books for treading very, very carefully into similar waters?
Edit: I think a 'cool-off' period between lending periods is actually a pretty good idea.