For the Ebooks Reader to get Worked up over the Restrictions Placed on Used and Borrowed Titles
Of course, e-books are handy. Just as MP3 players and other gadgets are convenient. However, making things virtual brings out fear and vulnerability among purveyors of digital content. Finally, with digital content, we frequently end up with fewer rights than we have grown used to with the old physical content we have always had. Go to Amazon and seek whatever book, and it’s likely that you’ll discover a couple of used books on offer at a fraction of the price of the new one. Buy an ebooks reader like the Kindle, and you’ll find once you are done with a book you have purchased, there’s no way for you to get something for it. If you wish you could at the least give it to your friend to read who happens to use a Barnes & Noble Nook. You would be out of luck there as well. You just don’t own your e-books the way you do regular books. In one strange case, Amazon, after it found that the publisher of a book it had been selling had some sort of change of heart over the entire arrangement they had with Amazon, decided to just remotely erase any copies customers had of the book on their Kindle readers.
Lendle (it’s supposed to sound amusingly like Lend + Kindle) has a great idea. There are numerous Kindle titles that you’re permitted to loan out just once for a period two weeks. The people behind Lendle thought that if they could get all Kindle owners together on their website, that they could have people with a copy of all ebook on Amazon to lend at one time. They felt that dozens of people could find a book to borrow or a book to lend this way. Which, if you think of it, is a great idea. Except that Amazon hates it. They feel that Lendle found a backdoor that Amazon just didn’t intend for anybody to use. One does not really know when they might shut them, or other sites like BookLending or eBookFling, down. With the Kindle or any other e-book’s reader, lending really is kind of a difficult area to deal in. Publishers always have the right to deny buyers the right to lend even once. There are just a handful of lendable e-books left on Amazon’s Kindle store today. The more desirable a book is, the less your chances are that you will find that it’s lendable.
If tomorrow, the laws were to change and state that if you bought a car you wouldn’t be allowed to sell it one day, would you ever buy it? Of course, you wouldn’t. E-book publishers need to understand that the more they grant people to sell, borrow and lend. The safer people will feel in making the investment. The ebooks reader concept would become a whole lot more popular if people were given the freedom to act in the normal way with their purchase.
