[alsaan]

I had just signed up for Lendle a few days ago. The website used the API to retrieve information about ebooks sold by Amazon (e.g title, author, cover image, whether it is lendable or not, ...). It'll be pretty difficult for them to resume operations without access to this data, they essentially will have to maintain their own separate database of ebooks.

As for the piracy concerns: Lendle was just a match-up service; the actual ebook exchange was performed by use of the official mechanism provided by Amazon, with all its associated restrictions. Still, you can see how the publishers fear a loss of revenue from this kind of sites (then again, they have the option of revoking the lendable status of their titles at any time).