Congratulations: You Killed LendInk And Denied Fellow Authors Lend Royalties

http://aprillhamilton.blogspot.com/2012/08/congratulations-you-killed-lendink-and.html

by sp332 • 14 years ago

93 68 14 years ago

aprillhamilton.blogspot.com

njloof• 14 years ago

When you restrict people from legitimate use of copyrighted work, they respect copyright less. Nice going, rights holders.

rprasad2• 14 years ago

An alternative way to look at it: When you use technology to do things in ways your content producers don't understand, they respect technology less. Eventually, they fight back, even if the technology does improve their situation.

Lesson? Make sure you explain how your technology works to the people who are providing your content. They are the ones you need to convince, because if you can bag them, they will become your biggest supporters and users.

sp3328• 14 years ago

There was a FAQ that explained in detail how the site worked. According to the site owner, most of the people who read it were no longer angry. Apparently almost none of the people sending hate mail to his web host even bothered to visit the site, they were just going by stuff they read on facebook.

jlgreco2• 14 years ago

Exactly. A rational defence works in courtrooms but is largely useless against angry mobs. If people are angry at you before they even meet you, there is not a terrible lot you can really be expected to do. Not without an advertising budget anyway.

rprasad2• 14 years ago

An FAQ is great for technically-minded people. But most authors are not technically minded people.

Lendink needed to have a dedicated page or section, for authors, telling them what they were doing (in layman's terms, not exact terms) and how the authors would benefit, and how the authors could opt out (i.e., link to Amazon's page on opting-out of lending, if such is possible for self-published books).

The greatest weakness of 99% of website/SAAS startups is that they don't realize that their target market may not have the technical skills to do much more than turn on the computer and navigate to gmail/hotmail.

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

When technology inventors have to explain themselves to content producers in order to not have their product killed, something has gone horribly wrong with the world.

I certainly agree with your second statement, that getting content producers on your side can give you strong supporters and users, but that should only represent a marketing/growth issue, not an existential threat.

franzus2• 14 years ago

> When technology inventors have to explain themselves to content producers in order to not have their product killed, something has gone horribly wrong with the world.

Not if those technology "inventors" want to make money from said content.

hluska• 14 years ago

First off, I support LendInk and think these authors behaved like children. Heck, I was outraged I even blogged about it.

However, I'd like to play devil's advocate for a moment. A few weeks ago, the Ryan Holiday fiasco went public. If you don't remember this, he was the guy who lied his way into coverage in mainstream media (ie - ABC, MSNBC, the New York Times, etc.) This was a situation where journalists didn't check their own facts (in this case, they didn't vet their expert) and they printed lies.

A few months ago, ABC tweeted that Hosni Mubarak had died. Turns out he was still alive (and it took journalists about twenty minutes to figure that out).

Journalists are in the business of fact checking, yet they've been caught many, many times unknowingly spreading hoaxes. Social media is incredibly powerful (now), but it will become useless if we don't teach civilians how to check their facts before they start lynch mobs.

Anyone have any ideas how we can guide users towards showing some restraint in similar situations?

nollidge• 14 years ago

I'm not sure, besides posting a giant "WE'RE REALLY NOT PIRATES, HERE'S WHY: (link)" at the top of your page, but then it might be a "doth protest too much" sort of turn-off to potential users.

Splines2• 14 years ago

I've never used LendInk (or any other e-book lending sites), but they could have a "For Authors" section prominently visible on the site, telling the authors why their work may be on the site, what they can do (it probably doesn't hurt to comply with take-down requests), and why it is to their benefit (I hope) that their work is shared with others in a platform-supported fashion.

Pfhreak• 14 years ago

They could have started with the name. The service they were providing was really all about matching people together to lend books to one another. They didn't actually do any lending. But the name LendInk could definitely be interpreted to mean that they, in fact, lent ink.

It's a small thing, and may not have mattered, but names carry a lot of power.

ktizo4• 14 years ago

If some authors are outraged about the idea of ink being lent, then what do they think about libraries?

Jun8• 14 years ago

Well, they don't want to show any restraint, AFAIK. The saga of clueless/greedy/whatever authors against technology is much larger than this particular case, e.g. just two days ago it was reported that the Author's Guild is seeking $2B from Google for book scanning and making snippets available, that's $750 for each book! Many authors back these efforts.

My (optimistic) feeling is that a small circle of businesses is brainwashing the authors, citing music piracy and the "success" of RIAA in suing pirates and the authors are taking the bait.

anthonyb4• 14 years ago

Why is $750 per book so outrageous? Books on average would make far more than that, so it doesn't seem completely out of the question.

anthonyb4• 14 years ago

No idea myself - Sam Harris had some choice words about the degeneration of online debate a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4358376

jlarocco• 14 years ago

Is there a list of authors who worked to shut the site down?

I doubt I read books by anybody so clueless, but just in case, I'd like to know which authors not to buy.

sp3328• 14 years ago

Here are a few, check the comments under the top post. Looks like Cassandre Dayne, Wendy Baker Smith, and Penny Baker for starters. https://www.facebook.com/pages/LendInk/124974504234948 Also Danielle Yockman from a post further down the page. edit: looks like this page is compiling a list http://ashentech.com/index.php/topic,3037.html?PHPSESSID=t9k...

edit2: Chrystalla Thoma said some negative things on facebook but never contacted LendInk, she has apologized. https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=3891497111...

sp3328• 14 years ago

Also I'd like to point out that even on the forums where a lot of noise was made, there were plenty of authors who saw reason and tried to talk others down. http://jeannetomlin.blogspot.com/2012/08/lendink-and-twitter...

tolos• 14 years ago

Someone on slashdot put together a list: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3035829&cid=4092...

As a side note, at least one of the authors did apologize -- and was instantly lynched in the comments http://www.digitalmediamachine.com/2012/08/what-happened-to-...

FireBeyond• 14 years ago

The apology was pretty weak.

"Oh, hey, I was one of the ones who attacked you, your site, host, business.

You got shut down, even though you did nothing wrong… Sorry."

I'm paraphrasing, but that was pretty much it. No regret, no "what can I do to help?", "I'll try to correct the disinformation I spread", just a literal "I'm sorry." The end.

kevinpet• 14 years ago

This is a poor article. Who shut it down? The ISP? In response to complaints from whom? Amazon? This is what goes in the first paragraph, not buried in the middle of paragraph nine.

waterlesscloud4• 14 years ago

Given that it rants about people coming to conclusions based on scant evidence, it's more than a little ironic that it comes to a lot of conclusions based on scant evidence.

Semaphor2• 14 years ago

> "At this time, the host company is only advising that they have received hundreds of threats regarding possible lawsuits if they did not take Lendink.com down immediately. I do not know personally if it was a result of authors, publishers, Amazon or other rights holders. I have not personally been in contact with anyone other thaan the host company. I do however have a certified letter awaiting my pickup at the post office which is from a company called Noble Romance."

and

>"The hosting company has offered to reinstate Lendink.com on the condition that I personally respond to all of the complaints individually. I have to say, I really do not know if it is worth the effort at this point. I have read the comments many of these people have posted and I don't think any form of communication will resolve the issues in their eyes. Most are only interested in getting money from me and others are only in in for the kill. They have no intentions of talking to me or working this out. So much for trying to start a business and live the American Dream."

source: http://www.digitalmediamachine.com/2012/08/what-happened-to-...

franzus2• 14 years ago

> Lend Royalties

I have the bad feeling that it's somewhere in the range of Spotify royalties where Lady Gaga gets ~$100/month.

sp3328• 14 years ago

It's 100% more than they get when a physical book is lent.

ghurlman• 14 years ago

So, still $0?

iand• 14 years ago

Several countries, including UK and Canada, levy royalties from libraries for lending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

Contrast to the marginal revenue (for the artist) for CD sales and iTunes downloads.

The artist gets very little in any of the cases.

andreasvc• 14 years ago

There was a blog post about Spotify by a musician which compared the figures, and IIRC Spotify's royalties were like 100 or 1000 times less, so yes, there's a significant difference.

jrockway• 14 years ago

This sort of thing always confuses me. If I were an indie author, I would want my book to be as widely read as possible. If I got more money upfront in exchange for what amounts to free advertising ("jrockway? never heard of him. but sure, I'll read his book for free."), I'd call that a pretty good deal. But I guess someone heard the word "free" and thought it would be a good idea to prevent any transaction that doesn't generate new money...

sp3328• 14 years ago

Well this is a tad disturbing: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XXRdrja... The Google cache of the FAQ page has a bunch of spam drug phrases on it... Did the page really have all that hidden on it when it was live??

wtetzner• 14 years ago

It might have been advertisements, and Google didn't save style information, so it's a lot more visible in the cached version than it was in the live version.

crazygringo• 14 years ago

There are site viruses that serve up normal content to normal users, and so go undetected, but serve up spam like that only to GoogleBot, since they're designed to affect PageRank etc. of specific sites.

That was likely the case.

toyg2• 14 years ago

The guy said the site was "on autopilot" for 18 months, so chances are that it was hacked and spammed.

waterlesscloud4• 14 years ago

Thinking about the other side of this for a moment, it does seem pretty obvious that LendInk changed the situation the authors thought they were getting into when they agreed to make their books lendable.

Given that, it's not surprising their first reaction is anger. Perhaps not rational, but humans are not inherently rational beings.

The authors thought "Lend my book to a friend? Sure, why not? Good word of mouth always helps!" A nice, forward thinking perspective.

But what LendInk makes possible is for lending to extend beyond normal social connections. You could go look for any book you wanted, never buy another book again. And each book would be lent the maximum number of times. There's a fundamental difference at work there, the dynamic changes considerably.

You could say "Well libraries work the same way! Buy once, lend forever!" But libraries are geographically constrained. And there are a lot of them. So being able to be lent anywhere in the country still means you sold a lot of books. It's fundamentally different.

So while this site certainly didn't promote piracy and authors were compensated when appropriate, it did subvert the terms they had agreed to, and it did so willfully.

I can see where the content creators are coming from there.

This is probably a good idea, and probably inevitable and unstoppable. But that doesn't mean it has to be on the same economic terms as the previous model.

Semaphor2• 14 years ago

there were several other sites making it possible.

Foy3• 14 years ago

But those lendable books could only be lent once, right?

So if you buy a book that's lendable you'd be able to "trade" your lend for someone else's lend. At best you're only getting one free read for every purchase.

That's a far cry better than some people I know who only read books they borrow from friends. Which, in meatspace, you can lend an infinite number of times.

jonhendry2• 14 years ago

"Which, in meatspace, you can lend an infinite number of times."

Well, no, because in meatspace you have a more limited social circle. Few people would lend a physical book to a complete stranger, or if they did, would know they'd probably never get it back. Plus of course time is a limitation, and if a borrower is not local, there's the time of transit back and forth, which doesn't exist for an e-book.

And as a practical matter, it is pretty unlikely that you'd be able to find a borrower for every one of your physical books. But that would be possible with e-books, given a way to lend them to strangers, because of the way the site can match borrowers to lenders.

mdc• 14 years ago

I don't think too many of the authors actually held the position you describe. You describe a situation where authors understood LendInk and didn't like the way it changed lending, but if you read the complaints from authors that accused LendInk of piracy, it's pretty clear the authors didn't understand what LendInk was doing and just reacted from a position of ignorance rather than informing themselves.

res0nat0r• 14 years ago

There is one author who is complaining on the LendInk FB page who seemed a bit clued in. She was objecting to the fact that the site allowed you to lend books to anyone and not just your friends and family like defined on the Kindle Lending page on Amazon.

She didn't like it because if Amazon allowed a lending service to match up anyone who wanted to lend on the Amazon site then she expects she should be getting paid royalty rates like libraries have to pay to lend to anyone.

DanBC• 14 years ago

In the UK there is an inter-library lending system, so if your local library doesn't have a book they'll borrow it from one that has.

You never hear authors railing against libraries, even though (in the UK) very many more books are read via libraries than bought new. But publishers, especially in the US, are vigorous about lending ebooks.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9722000/9722410....)

(Last segment of programme, starting at about 20minutes in)

Kerrick• 14 years ago

While it sucks that any legitimate site had to go through this, I'm it was LendInk and not Lendle.me that got the brunt of this. I have a bunch of lend credits on the latter, but have never used the former.

ecrotty• 14 years ago

I tried my best to defend this site. I was in the thick of it with many of the authors that frankly were quite simply, technically challenged as to how the site would work.

I was in the accusation threads on Kindleboards ..

You can see a lot of the back and forth there. It was really spiraling out of control. So much so, it was ripe for disruption (it likely still is) as many of the authors were (and are) looking for methods to have essentially DMCA takedown notices on cruise control.

(seriously, there seems to be a big market for this amongst the indie authors that don't have a handle on some of the more technical and copyright issues at hand. ps. if anyone wants to know more or talk through ideas, reach out.)

Anyway, I put forth quite a bit about how the whole Amazon associate world works (in plain terms) and how other sites, that have been around much longer and were MUCH bigger (no offense LendInk) such as lendle.me (which if memory serves had their site name challenged because they got on the amazon radar back in the day).

I dunno.. I was pretty amazed to see how quickly it all unfolded and how others jumped on board without a full understanding of how the site functions worked.

Sorry to hear about the whole situation. I have a site in the same space (but not lending) and its unfortunate to see the door closed on what could be a very good (and profitable) promotional engine for both the site and the book authors.

EDIT : a bit more of the backstory

I can add something valuable from being a part of the thread. A big problem for some of the early authors was that their books were NOT available to be lent (as per author -- I didn't verify).

ASSUMING this was accurate of some of the initial outraged authors and not the "hey get my book down" others that came along in time, I put forth the idea in multiple threads that perhaps the devs of the site got too much data in a sweep via the API.

In other words, they didn't bother to get books that were available to be loaned. And, did just a big sweep across the Amazon API looking for any and all Kindle books.

Somewhat makes sense -- the more books, the more opportunity for affiliate tag clicks. And, it probably errors out (or did) saying this book is not eligible. I believe an author even confirmed this early on.

It was this simple oversight that REALLY added the fuel to the fire.

Hope that gives some additional insight to those that weren't part of the madness.

Enjoy! :)

gnu82• 14 years ago

Its important to remember that there is nothing wrong with lending someone your digital book, the same as lending your physical book. You don't need the author, vendor, or any third party intermediary to authorize you. If any party attempts to use DRM to infringe your moral rights, it is morally right to break that DRM, law be damned.

sp3328• 14 years ago

I'm not sure intellectual property would exist at all then.

gnu82• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if intellectual property exists either.

Congratulations: You Killed LendInk And Denied Fellow Authors Lend Royalties

Related Stories