Kindle Lending Library to end Jan 4, 2021

[John F]

From Amazon:

Kindle owners with Amazon Prime memberships can choose from thousands of books to read for free once a month from the Kindle Owners' Lending Library (KOLL)...

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by SeaBookGuy

It is a Prime benefit in the sense that the books are only available to Prime members! It is not as you imply available to all Kindle or Fire owners without Prime memberships.

I was under the impression that KLL authors received some sort of modest compensation?

No, that is wrong: KOLL pre-dates Prime and has been available to non-Prime users with Amazon devices. This is what is going away.

I do not actually know what is available in KOLL vs Prime Reading and Kindle Unlimited, and have no way to check as I’m both a Prime and KU subscriber. It is at least as much as Prime Reading and might even be anything in KU (and probably payout to content owners is the same). But the latter two are not restricted to Amazon devices and are ‘unlimited’ up to the borrowing limit (1 in the case of Prime Reading and 10 in the case of KU) instead of one per month.

FWIW there were in fact a couple of titles in KOLL that were never available in Prime Reading or Kindle Unlimited, though this is a moot point now.

[DrNefario]

KOLL was never available without Prime here in the UK.

It did seem that Prime Reading was meant to replace it, and they've obviously been trying to hide it for ages, but I'd now need KU to get what I was getting from KOLL. That means Prime is pretty much just a video streaming service to me, now.

[mitford13]

KOLL is/was only for Prime members and authors do get compensated.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201392160

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

KOLL was never available without Prime here in the UK.

It did seem that Prime Reading was meant to replace it, and they've obviously been trying to hide it for ages, but I'd now need KU to get what I was getting from KOLL. That means Prime is pretty much just a video streaming service to me, now.

I guess I was wrong on this. Prime was introduced in 2005. The Kindle Lending Library was introduced in 2011 and it looks like it always was part of the Prime package. I guess we must have had Prime when this program first came out and, since I didn't buy my first Kindle until after 2011, the Kindle Lending Library was always there.

Here's a link to a news release in November, 2011 (basically an Amazon press release).

https://mashable.com/2011/11/03/amazonlending-library/

[SeaBookGuy]

Some months I have scrambled specifically to find a KOLL title to use the benefit; some have been either "meh" or DNF, so it will likely be a loss of a few bucks a year for a series or two that interest me, not nearly enough to pay for KU instead.

[haertig]

I have used KOLL on a few rare occasions. You can't search for KOLL books, at least I couldn't find a way to. However, you CAN search for KU books and every KU book I searched out was available on KOLL (that doesn't mean all KU books are on KOLL, just the ones I searched for!)

KOLL is like "KU Lite". You can check out one book at a time with KOLL, and only one book per month. But in my experience, the KOLL selection was the same as the KU selection.

One poster above said that KOLL was only available for Kindles and not for Fire tablets running the Kindle app. That is incorrect. The few KOLL books I checked out were always checked out from my Fire tablet and read on my Fire tablet. As a matter of fact, I never figured out a way to check out a KOLL book except by using my Fire tablet to check it out. I'm sure there must be a way, but I didn't see it. Also, when you have a KU subscription, you cannot check out a KOLL book. KOLL becomes available again after your KU subscription ends.

But now KOLL is going away, so none of the above matters.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by mitford13

KOLL is/was only for Prime members and authors do get compensated.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201392160

Not properly. Nor is this clearly explained when you publish on KDP.

Every time a unique customer reads pages in your book for the first time, you will be eligible for royalties.

Also that relies on direct connection of the Kindle to Amazon, at least by WiFi, and invasive tracking compared to other paper or ebook libraries.

Amazon has no right to make these rules, it's an abuse of their market power.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Not properly.

That is your opinion, not fact.

Also that relies on direct connection of the Kindle to Amazon, at least by WiFi, and invasive tracking compared to other paper or ebook libraries.

As does the equivalent program from Kobo.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Also that relies on direct connection of the Kindle to Amazon, at least by WiFi, and invasive tracking compared to other paper or ebook libraries.

Originally Posted by murraypaul

That is your opinion, not fact.

As does the equivalent program from Kobo.

Perhaps Quoth can think of a way to have the number of pages read in a borrowed book tracked without having some form of tracking in place. I accept that Kindle Unlimited or KoboPlus are going to require tracking of pages read in a book so calling it invasive is a bit of a stretch.

[haertig]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Perhaps Quoth can think of a way to have the number of pages read in a borrowed book tracked without having some form of tracking in place. I accept that Kindle Unlimited or KoboPlus are going to require tracking of pages read in a book so calling it invasive is a bit of a stretch.

How about some payment method that does not require them to know how many pages have been read? Base payment on something else, the obvious thing being that the book was borrowed or bought in the first place. Kind of like everything else in this world.

Amazon came up with a scheme to withhold money from authors by saying a deal is not a deal until the customer actually reads the book. Note that Amazon gets the KU subscription payment up front, without the book having to be read - they just withhold it from the authors. Pretty sneaky. And in some bizarre twist of logic, authors bought into that and (apparently) signed contracts based on it. What a stupid thing to do, but who am I to say? But the agreement between Amazon and authors in no way forces a burden on me to leave my WiFi on so they can track this data. Bad idea, bad implementation, bad results. But that's between Amazon and the authors.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by haertig

How about some payment method that does not require them to know how many pages have been read? Base payment on something else, the obvious thing being that the book was borrowed or bought in the first place. Kind of like everything else in this world.

Because authors try to cheat the system.

If it is just on number of books borrowed, they split one real book into single books per chapter. If it is books borrowed * number of pages, they combine lots together and pad it out to make one huge book and go for a click-bait title. If it is just number of borrows, not any metric of whether it was read or not, they get people or bots to just check the book out and never read it.

The system has gone through several iterations to make it harder to cheat or automate with bots.

The current system rewards authors whose books people actually choose to read all the way through, at the expense of authors whose books people read a small amount of and give up on without finishing.

That seems like a good outcome.

Amazon came up with a scheme to withhold money from authors by saying a deal is not a deal until the customer actually reads the book. Note that Amazon gets the KU subscription payment up front, without the book having to be read

There is no financial difference to Amazon one way or another. The same amount of KU money gets divided up whatever the formula is, all that changes is which authors get more or less.

The same is true of Kobo's system, which uses minutes read rather than pages read, but is otherwise similar.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by haertig

How about some payment method that does not require them to know how many pages have been read? Base payment on something else, the obvious thing being that the book was borrowed or bought in the first place. Kind of like everything else in this world.

Amazon has tried multiple ways of determining Kindle Unlimited payouts and the obvious ones turn out to have negative consequences.

If the payout is a fixed amount per book then publishers are incentivized to publish only short works and to break up longer ones into a series with as few pages as possible in each one.

If the payout is based on the size of book and paid at borrow then unscrupulous publishers put out books with minimal content padded with many pages of junk.

If the payout is based on the furthest page read then publishers put the good content at the end with a link at the beginning to jump to it.

Even the current system based on actual pages read has been gamed. Amazon's technique for determining page reads is somewhat complicated in order to work around other scams that have been tried.

(Edit: Ninja'd)

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

That is your opinion, not fact.



As does the equivalent program from Kobo.

Online eRetail making their own rules and cheating content providers compared to traditional sales and royalties (shops and libraries) is an absolute fact.

Content providers should get paid whatever price they want per copy, and then retail sell at any price.
Libraries (even online etext) should pay full price or content providers library price (see Smashwords) for how many copies they lend at once and per borrrow royalty. NOT based on pages, as that is abusive tracking of users and not how it should work.

Amazon is making up their own rules to suit themselves, which abuse the privacy of readers and are contrary to what content providers want and contrary to law in many countries.
Content providers should not be forced to set a retail price. Amazon should pay a content providers price and for loans in UK or Ireland have the SAME rules as real libraries, ie pay for simultaneous copies at content provider's library rate AND pay the national agreed per borrow royalty.

It's time big Corporations using the Internet to Market and Sell have the same rules applied as everyone else and respect privacy and local laws.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Online eRetail making their own rules and cheating content providers compared to traditional sales and royalties (shops and libraries) is an absolute fact.

No it isn't.
Cheating means something.

Content providers should get paid whatever price they want per copy, and then retail sell at any price.

That is how it used to work, then the content providers illegally colluded to force a change to the system they wanted, which is where they set the retail price and Amazon are forced to accept it.

Amazon is making up their own rules to suit themselves, which abuse the privacy of readers and are contrary to what content providers want and contrary to law in many countries.

So now Amazon is breaking the law, but noone else has noticed?

Content providers should not be forced to set a retail price. Amazon should pay a content providers price and for loans in UK or Ireland have the SAME rules as real libraries, ie pay for simultaneous copies at content provider's library rate AND pay the national agreed per borrow royalty.

KU is not the same as normal libraries.

In the UK and Ireland, publishers have no choice whether libraries can buy and lend their physical books, it is a legal right of the library they can't do anything about. In return, they get a legally specified payment for borrows.

With KU, authors/publishers have the choice. They can put their books in KU, accepting the terms Amazon offer, or choose not to. The only books in KU are ones the authors/publishers have decided to put there.

Should publishers/authors be forced to make their eBooks to be available for library borrowing? They aren't at the moment, and it is clear that several publishers would rather that eBook lending didn't exist at all.