[jlemonde]

I've just been told that Nook and Kindle both have a way to lend book to other users, but yet does Kobo not have such a feature...

From a financial perspective can I perfectly understand that Rakuten are delaying the day where there are going to implement that because it implies that friends which all have a Kobo would buy books several times instead of sharing their purchases. But on the other hand, if you type in, in any web search engine, keywords like "Kobo share books" or "Kobo lend book to others", you would find amongst the first results pages which explain to you how to (very easily) break the Adobe Digital Rights Management (Adobe DRM) in order to get an epub free from limitations, which you can then give away and copy as many times you want, which is much more than what you initially wanted to do. Such behaviour makes that authors get much less paid for their work than they should, and resellers are concerned as well.

Thus I think that an official way to lend books to others should be implemented. This would avoid that people start removing the DRMs for the only sake to let their friends read a book they purchased. It could fight against piracy and make less pirated ebooks available on the www.

So, back to my question. Do we have a chance to convince Rakuten ? If we have, what steps should we go and whom should we contact first?

Thanks in advance for reading and considering this. If you have got further arguments, please comment with these as well.

Johannes