In theory lending e-books should be as simple as lending paper ones.  In actuality the process is bewildering and daunting, particularly in the retail e-book space. Though the savvy technicians of Barnes & Noble/Nook and now Amazon/Kindle are on the way to solving many problems, they have a long way to go. At least that is the conclusion to be drawn from the first part of a two-part article by Erik Christopher in Publishing Perspectives, Friends, Romans, Librarians: Lend Me Your E-book (Part 1).

It might help for you to refresh your understanding about how e-book lending works. Here’s the nutshell version drawn from an article we posted a while back about library lending. “Your library buys an e-book from a publisher. It is then offered for loan to the library’s patrons, and there is a waiting list. When your turn comes up you download the e-book and have it exclusively for a limited period of time. When that time expires the e-book disappears from the patron’s computer and is offered to the next person on the waiting list. If a book is popular, a library or library system may buy more than one e-book version enabling the library to offer it to multiple borrowers.” (See What’s the Difference between Borrowing E-Books and Borrowing Print Books?)  For a device-by-device instructional on downloading library books from the New York Public Library, read Get the Most Out of Your Gadgets with NYPL.

In response to strong customer demand, Barnes & Noble and Amazon have tried to replicate the library experience but fallen short.  Unlike that model, developed and refined by Steve Potash, founder of OverDrive, the leading supplier of e-books to libraries, commercial e-book retailers do not make the borrowing experience remotely as easy as the buying experience.

One university librarian complained that “The problem with many of the lending models is that they are messy. The readers are designed for individuals and not libraries. This in turn forces librarians to often use back doors and is not efficient. Customer service is another issue. Trying to get a hold of someone from Amazon to assist us took a long time. They don’t have a good point of contact to work with libraries and you basically end up bouncing around from one person to another.”

Another said ““Not being able to pay with a corporate account, which we have, is frustrating. We are tax exempt and there is a lot of paperwork and back end work that needs to be done if we pay tax and then need to correct it for our tax exempt status.”

Other frustrations include the restriction by B&N and Amazon to one borrower at a time.  DRM – Digital Rights Management – is yet another issue. Librarians want to be free to acquire books in whatever format they choose, but the restrictiveness of Kindle and Nook DRM makes that impossible. “I’d love it if there were a way to actually ‘lend’ the Kindle books to patrons who wanted to read the books on their own devices,” one librarian wistfully wished.

Christopher’s conclusion? “None of this will be decided by retailers and aggregators simply taking an approach and saying, ‘This is our model, take it or leave it.’ We need to be innovative and understand also that what is an e-book is also changing.”

For one consumer’s less than thrilling adventure in borrowing-land, read Why I didn’t Buy a Kindle.

All this said, help is on the way thanks to a number of e-book lending clubs and websites that take the angst and complexity out of the process and match lenders to borrowers using the terms of the Kindle or Nook.  You can read about some of them here.

Richard Curtis

Taking an electronic leaf from rival Barnes & Noble’s playbook, Amazon has announced a lending feature for its customers.

‘The Kindle Book Lending feature allows users to lend digital books they have purchased through the Kindle Store to their friends and family,” says a recent Amazon.con release. “Each book may be lent once for a duration of 14 days and will not be readable by the lender during the loan period.”  As loans are not sales, authors will receive no additional royalties, but it is hoped that loaned e-books will attract new reading audiences.

For would be lenders and borrowers, details may be read here.

Richard Curtis