Amazon has announced that it'll soon be allowing Kindle owners to "lend" e-books to their friends for 14 days, in the same way that the Nook does in the US.

It's an interesting move, especially in light of Amazon chief Jeff Bezo's mocking of the Nook's lending feature last year as "extremely limited". The team at Barnes & Noble is no doubt smirking a little today, because the Kindle's implementation follows exactly the same rules.

You'll only be able to lend each e-book once, to one person, for a maximum period of 14 days, and then only if the publisher decides to enable the feature for its releases. If the publisher doesn't want to play ball, then no lending for you. Most egregious, however, is the restriction that if you've lent a book out to someone then you can't read it yourself.

Yep, you read that right. Amazon (and Barnes & Noble, because the Nook has the same limitation) is trying to introduce artificial scarcity in a market of infinite goods. There's absolutely no technical reason why that has to be the case -- and in fact it makes the technological process more complicated, rather than less.

The problem is that buying an e-book isn't like buying a real book at all. Instead of a purchase, it's a licensing arrangement. You're buying a license to read the book only in the manner that Amazon lets you. As a result, you have pretty much zilcho in the way of rights. The major book publishers have failed so far to learn from the music and movie industry's digital failures.

Some might claim that it's unfair to criticise Amazon (and B&N) for restrictions that are the fault of the publishers. I disagree. The creators of e-book readers should be standing up for the rights of their users, and pushing back against ridiculous demands like this.

There is no good reason -- technical or otherwise -- why the owner of a Kindle or Nook should be deprived of something they've paid for when they want to show a friend how good a piece of work is, with the objective of trying to persuade them to get a copy themselves.

It hurts sales. It hurts the industry. And moreover it hurts the attempts of manufacturers to get e-books to take off.


  1. totally correct - limitation and control for what? to inspire someone to hack it? make it open simple and easy and then we will all buy more / make more / enjoy more.  

    Oct 26th 2010
  2. You read a book, you lend it to someone.You can't read that book when it's lent to someone, why should it be any different with an e-book?If it was unrestricted then I would NEVER buy books, I'd just borrow of friends and family.  

    Christopher Newby
    Feb 5th 2011
  3. To be fair to Amazon about the whole licensing giving the user "pretty much zilcho in the way of rights" is completely false. When you buy a physical book, you're actually only buying the rights to read it as well. But people don't realise this because you end up with something physical that can remain for years to come and be borrowed at will in a way that we have all become accustomed to - i.e. you want to borrow the book, fine take it and give it back later. People should be able to lend their books to friends, but they shouldn't be able to continue reading it in the mean time as this has no physical analogue.Publishers should not, however, be given the "option" to disable this feature because they are already receiving more for their work than they would with printing costs to contend with as well. I can understand why Amazon are passing the buck to publishers for this, however, because no matter what anyone thinks, if Amazon wants to make a continued success of the Kindle, they need to give publishers a sense of security and control over their goods. This is easy when you sell something physical to a book shop, but how can they be 100% sure that their digital goods are not being pirated unless Amazon provides them with a way of selling those digital goods that is proven to be water tight with all the due revenue going back to the publisher? Offering them the option of disabling new features that were obviously not part of the original licensing agreement with those publishers is the only way they can maintain that trust for Amazon. The alternative would be that Amazon looks into offering lending as a service to their Kindle owners, one big publisher says no and pulls out all their e-books and Amazon is faced with either losing a market share for the Kindle or disabling the new lending feature all together. I would rather have lending on some books in a restrictive way than to have no lending at all or a loss of some books from the Kindle store.Now if only Amazon would enable this feature in the UK, I would be a happy boy :)  

    Stuart McHattie
    Mar 22nd 2011

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