Kindle book lending site!

I find this fascinating - someone has set up a website to borrow and lend Kindle books.  The site is called Lendle and you can read about how it works here.  The site's FAQ makes it pretty clear that what they are doing is taking advantage of the fact that Amazon allows you to share books with friends.  That sharing is pretty restrictive, but if you were to scale it up, as Lendle is trying to do, you could create a borrowing library of some substance.  In the end, however, the problem remains with this statement from the FAQ:

How many times can I lend my book?

Unfortunately, Amazon only allows each owner of a book to lend it once.

The scale will have to be quite large, in terms of copies of each title, in order to make the service work for very long.  I think the time is coming to hash out what will become of the "printed" word.  The idea the Lendle represents is what most of us recognize as at least an interlibrary loan (ILL) system, something libraries everywhere already do with paper material.

The issue seems to be whether or not people will pirate all the ebooks if the publishers relax their rules just a tad.  Will that happen?  Maybe.  Certainly, to some degree there will always be copyright violations - there always have been.  But libraries buy a lot of books.  Libraries will continue to buy a lot of books in paper format for the foreseeable future.  We want to continue to make the published word available to everyone, including those people who won't buy an ereader or will not be able to afford to buy one and the books to read on it.

There's always print-on-demand too.  How cool would that be?  Patron checks catalog...oops!  The Library doesn't own that one.  "No problem!" says the librarian, "Have a cup of coffee and I'll bring you your copy in a few minutes!"