Posts tagged lending
Thanks to iPads and Kindles, E-Book Lending at Libraries Explodes
Jan 20th
When the concept of libraries lending out e-books first came about, the idea had its skeptics. Some in the publishing industry worried that the practice could eat into e-book sales, while others questioned whether such a system would be popular or effective among consumers. Some recent statistics suggest that library e-book lending is taking off.
Driven in large part by the proliferation of tablets and e-readers, digital book lending is on the rise, according to OverDrive, a leading supplier of digital content to U.S. libraries. The company, which partnered with Amazon for its Kindle lending program, reported recently that it saw a 130% increase in traffic to its “virtual branch” websites last year. OverDrive works with 18,000 libraries to offer e-books and other digital content to members.
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This growth comes as the explosion in both e-readers and more sophisticated tablet computers shows no sign of slowing down. Amazon breathed new life into the e-reader hardware market last year by releasing a whole new line of Kindles, including a touchscreen e-ink device and the company’s first full-color tablet, the Kindle Fire. The device offers an affordable, if less capable, alternative to the iPad, which continues to dominate the tablet space as Apple prepares to release its third iteration in a matter of weeks.
The Kindle Fire may not be an iPad killer, but it sure is mimicking Apple’s early tablet sales growth. The device was the top-selling item on Amazon over the holiday season, with its e-ink counterparts not too far behind.
Mobile devices like tablets and smartphones have played no small role in the growth in library lending of e-books. OverDrive reports a 22% increase in traffic from such devices. In total, traffic to the company’s virtual branches double from 2010 to 2011, to 1.6 billion page views. In addition to iPads and Kindles, the OverDrive borrowed e-books were accessed from Android devices, Nooks, iPods, Windows Phone and Blackberry smartphones, and the Sony Reader.
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As E-Readers Explode, So Does E-Book Library Lending
Jan 20th
When the concept of libraries lending out e-books first came about, the idea had its skeptics. Some in the publishing industry worried that the practice could eat into e-book sales, while others questioned whether such a system would be popular or effective among consumers. Some recent statistics suggest that library e-book lending is taking off.
Driven in large part by the proliferation of tablets and e-readers, digital book lending is on the rise, according to OverDrive, a leading supplier of digital content to U.S. libraries. The company, which partnered with Amazon for its Kindle lending program, reported recently that it saw a 130% increase in traffic to its “virtual branch” websites last year. OverDrive works with 18,000 libraries to offer e-books and other digital content to members.
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This growth comes as the explosion in both e-readers and more sophisticated tablet computers shows no sign of slowing down. Amazon breathed new life into the e-reader hardware market last year by releasing a whole new line of Kindles, including a touchscreen e-ink device and the company’s first full-color tablet, the Kindle Fire. The device offers an affordable, if less capable, alternative to the iPad, which continues to dominate the tablet space as Apple prepares to release its third iteration in a matter of weeks.
The Kindle Fire may not be an iPad killer, but it sure is mimicking Apple’s early tablet sales growth. The device was the top-selling item on Amazon over the holiday season, with its e-ink counterparts not too far behind.
Mobile devices like tablets and smartphones have played no small role in the growth in library lending of e-books. OverDrive reports a 22% increase in traffic from such devices. In total, traffic to the company’s virtual branches double from 2010 to 2011, to 1.6 billion page views. In addition to iPads and Kindles, the OverDrive borrowed e-books were accessed from Android devices, Nooks, iPods, Windows Phone and Blackberry smartphones, and the Sony Reader.
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Top Indie Authors Earn Thousands in First Month of Kindle Lending
Jan 12th
Amazon reports today that the Kindle E-Book Lending Library now offers over 75,000 books, boosted by the launch of the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select program for independent publishers. The KDP Select program launched in December, and Kindle customers borrowed 295,000 KDP Select titles that month. The top authors in the program earned thousands of dollars on top of their regular monthly sales.
Amazon increased its monthly funding for KDP Select from $500,000 to $700,000 this month after the strong showing. KDP authors earned $1.70 per borrow. The top 10 KDP Select authors saw a 30% increase from lending on top of the royalties they earned from sales of the same titles. Amazon’s end-run around Big Publishing shows promise for authors.
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Amazon says that total sales of titles in the KDP Select lending program grew faster than KDP titles that aren’t in the lending program, but they don’t say how much. But the $200,000 bonus to the KDP Select fund is a signal of optimism. The fund is divided between the authors each month depending on their percentage of total books borrowed. One author, Carolyn McCray, earned $8,250 from the fund in December.
The Kindle Lending Library itself launched on November 2. It’s available to Amazon Prime members. It has tight restrictions – users can only borrow one book per month – so 295,000 titles in one month means 295,000 people.
For authors in the KDP Select lending program, the numbers are great, but Amazon is characteristically cagey about other specifics. It won’t share the exact size of the sales bump KDP Select authors got over non-lending KDP authors. It doesn’t disclose how many books were lent in the Lending Library program overall.
The biggest bugbear of them all for Amazon reporters is the specific number of Kindles sold. Amazon will report percentage growth in Kindle sales, but they never disclose exactly how many devices are in people’s hands. Still, we know this: 295,000 or so people borrowed Kindle books from independent authors last month, and some of those authors made lots of money.
Do you have an e-reader? Which one? Do you read on it often?
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Big Question (Answered): “Does Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library Entice You to Buy Prime?”
Nov 3rd
By now, you’ve seen Amazon’s lending library. With thousands of titles of books, over 13,000 movies and TV shows and free 2 day shipping, Prime has some significant features and benefits. But is it enough? Are you planning on getting a subscription to Prime? If so, what pushed you over the edge? Was the lending library a significant factor?
We had our own discussion today, in the staff chat room, and opinions were mixed. Some of us have been Prime members for years but at least one writer was uninterested. Interestingly, the holdout did say the Kindle Fire was almost enough temptation for Prime.
We wondered how you felt though.
Does Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library Entice You to Buy Prime?
We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
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Amazon Sets Up Lending Library for Amazon Prime Kindle Owners
Nov 2nd
Today the world’s biggest bookseller is opening up shop as a lending library. That’s right, Amazon is getting into the book lending business, albeit on a very small scale. This is good for Kindle owners, and a sign that Amazon is going to go to the mat to ensure that it puts a Kindle in as many hands as possible.
The company is announcing the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, which will feature thousands of books that Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership can download. This comes in addition to the Prime library of more than 13,000 movies and TV shows.
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Amazon Really Wants You to Own a Kindle
According to Amazon’s release, the company is paying a fixed fee in some cases, and in other cases paying on a per-checkout basis for each Kindle title that’s in the library. That means that any way you slice it, Amazon is paying to let its customers check out books.
Why? Amazon says this is “a no-risk trial to demonstrate to publishers the incremental growth and revenue opportunity that this new service presents.”
Don’t Get Too Excited
Unlike Amazon Video Streaming for Prime, there’s a limit to Amazon’s largess here: Users get access to one book a month with no due dates. So if you have dreams of burning your library card and tapping the Kindle library for all your reading needs, guess again.
The company says the library will have “thousands” of titles, including more than 100 current and former New York Times bestsellers. Right out of the gate, Amazon is offering Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis, Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Note that this only seems to be available to owners of Kindle hardware. If you’re using the Kindle app for iPhone or iPad, you’re going to be out of luck. If you do have a Kindle, it should show up in the Kindle Store when you click “See all categories” and you’ll be presented with the option to buy for free.
This is a nice little feature, though I’m not sure it would sway most users from a different e-reader to a Kindle. When I’m in a reading mood, I often tear through as much as a book every day (though more often every two or three days). So the lending library isn’t going to keep avid readers full up on reading material. But, every little bit counts. A free book is better than none. What say you, readers? Would this convince you to buy a Kindle, or pony up for Amazon’s Prime membership?
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OverDrive Hints That Kindle Library Lending is Coming in September
Aug 3rd
The CEO of OverDrive, which distributes e-books and audiobooks to libraries, has dropped a pretty obvious hint that the Kindle will join other major e-readers in public libraries in September. EarlyWord reports that Steve Potash looked “like a kid with a delicious secret” at OverDrive’s Digipalooza conference last weekend, saying that he was “not allowed to announce a date ye[t],” but he included this blunt clue in his “Crystal Ball Report” during the final session:
Streamlining (both downloading and ordering)
Explosion (we have gone from two reading devices to 85 and more are coming)
Premium (the library catalog as the most premium, value-added site on the Web)
Traffic (enormous growth coming by year’s end)
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OverDrive’s WIN platform for library lending is up and ready to support Kindle, but Amazon has been cautious about rolling out Kindle lending to libraries, even as Nook, Sony Reader, and Kobo e-books are already available.
Amazon has generally been slow to allow lending on the Kindle, and they’ve also been cautious about the branding. But Potash’s hint seems to indicate that library lending for Kindle has almost arrived, and none too soon for the e-book release of Harry Potter.
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Earn a Little Extra Money Lending Your E-Books Via Lendle
May 23rd
Kindle e-book lending service Lendle has added an interesting new feature to its service today: the ability for users to earn a little money when they lend their e-books via the site.
Most users will be credited $.50 for every e-book lent, and patrons – those who’ve supported the site with a one-time $25 donation – will get $1.00 for every e-book lent. Every time users rack up $10 in credits, they’ll receive a $10 Amazon gift card.
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According to the blog post announcing the new feature, Lendle co-founder Brian Ford says that the idea of rewarding users for lending books has always been something that the startup has wanted to do. “We believed then and we believe now that this is the way a service like Lendle should operate.” After all, you can only lend a Kindle e-book once, and so Lendle and the other similar e-book lending services like BookLending.com have depended on the altruism of their users in order to grant that one-time loan to a complete stranger.
Lendle does make this announcement with a couple of caveats noting that its ability to run this rewards program largely depends on the success of its Patron program. In other words, if it doesn’t bring in the revenue to cover the costs, then it might have to scrap the feature.
Lendle also notes that if Amazon changes its lending policies, say allowing users to lend books more than once, then it may also have to re-evaluate the pay-to-lend program.
The Seattle-based startup has already had a run-in with Amazon over e-book lending. In March, Amazon yanked Lendle’s access to its API as the site had violated the Terms of Service by pulling Kindle users’ full library into the app in order to pre-populate the system with books that could be available to loan. After addressing that issue, Lendle had its access reinstated.
I asked Lendle’s other co-founder Jeff Croft if he was concerned that this latest feature could again attract Amazon’s ire, but he seemed confident, having reviewed the Kindle licensing agreements, that that wouldn’t happen.
“We are confident we’re not in violation in any way. We’re definitely not taking any money out of their pockets – in fact, we expect this feature to encourage book buying more so than any lending site, including Lendle, has in the past.
We’ve always believed this is the way a lending service ought to work. We’re asking folks to use their one-time license to lend their Kindle book on a stranger instead of on one of their friends. We think, if someone is generous enough to do that, they deserve to share some of Lendle’s profits.”
Of course, as great as this new feature might sound, it’s still disappointing how very few Kindle titles are actually available to lend. Perhaps by encouraging more people to do so and then rewarding them with Amazon gift cards, more publishers will actually start to make their titles available to loan. Perhaps.
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Librarians React to Amazon’s New Lending Library: More Questions Than Celebrations
Apr 21st
At first glance, yesterday’s news that Amazon is launching a Lending Library – an arrangement to make Kindle e-books available for libraries to loan – sounds like good news for libraries. But many librarians are taking the news in stride, glad to have more options for their patrons, but cautious – even skeptical – about the program’s implementation and its impact.
The stakes are incredibly high for public libraries right now. Federal, state, and local budgets are tight. Libraries are closing or cutting back on services. Alongside these fiscal trends are digital trends: the explosive growth in e-books, something that is radically changing the face of book publishing, book distribution, and yes, book lending.
Clearly consumers are interested in reading e-books, as the latest sales figures from the Association of American Publishers demonstrate. But what isn’t clear is how this interest in e-books will translate into libraries’ ability to meet their patrons’ demands. There are questions about licensing, DRM, fees, and formats, for example.
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Amazon’s announcement yesterday hasn’t really cleared that up. Nor has it seemed to have quelled all of the concerns that librarians have about the future of e-books and libraries.
Good News for Libraries and Library Patrons
There is good news here, of course. The Kindle is an incredibly popular e-reader, and Amazon says that the library option will work with both the device and with Kindle apps. That greatly opens accessibility to library patrons who might not own Sony e-readers or Nooks, the two devices that, until now, were common in libraries that had e-book lending programs.
More good news: Amazon will let you annotate your library books – forbidden in print, but amazing in e-books. These notes will be uniquely yours; the next library patron won’t see them. But you’ll be able to access them again if you check the book out again or purchase it.
Questions Remain for Librarians
But as we noted yesterday, Amazon’s announcement was light on specifics, leading many librarians to ask questions about exactly how this new lending program would work. Some of these were answered when Karen Estrovich, the collection specialist for OverDrive, a company that handles many libraries’ digital content and that is partnered with Amazon to roll out this new lending library, wrote a post clarifying some issues, including one of the most important to libraries:
Will libraries have to buy new e-book copies in order to have files available in a Kindle-compatible format?
According to Estrovich, no. “Your existing collection of downloadable eBooks will be available to Kindle customers. As you add new eBooks to your collection, those titles will also be available in Kindle format for lending to Kindle and Kindle reading apps. Your library will not need to purchase any additional units to have Kindle compatibility. This will work for your existing copies and units.”
But there are still other questions, including those asked by librarians Sarah Houghton-Jan and by Bobbi Newman:
- Will this represent a change in pricing and licensing models for titles?
- Will self-published authors on Amazon’s platform have a chance of being on library “shelves” now?
- Can library patrons opt out of linking their Amazon accounts to their library account?
- How much check out information will Amazon have access to? How will that change if someone purchases a title they’ve borrowed?
And another big question: which publishers are participating? Simon & Schuster and Macmillan have opted to never license e-books to libraries. And HarperCollins has decreed that its books will “self-destruct” after 26 check-outs, forcing libraries to buy them again.
Finally, as GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram asks, “Who owns the books?” What happens when publishers change their terms of use? When you actualy own a book on the bookshelf, that’s not an issue. When it’s a digital book, licensed to you, it’s something else entirely.
What About ePUB?
The announcement may have other implications as well, as libraries will now have access to Amazon’s (proprietary) Kindle file format in addition to the open format ePUB. ePUB, available as both DRM and DRM-free, has been the primary format in which libraries have distributed their e-books. While ePUB files work on other e-readers and e-reader apps (on the Nook, on Kobo, on Stanza, and on Sony’s e-reader, for example), Amazon has not supported ePUB on the Kindle (as a delivery format).
Will Amazon now support ePUB? That seems unlikely. Will Amazon use Adobe Digital Edition’s DRM services on ePUB? Again, unlikely. Amazon already has DRM “baked in” to its e-book format.
What will happen, then, to ePUB now that Amazon brings its own format and DRM into the library market? According to Mike Cane, in a rather provocative statement, “ePUB is dead.”
That’s certainly a better headline than “the library is dead.”
Of course, declarations of “this changes everything!” and “X killed Y!” are often overblown. But it’s hard to argue that the move of Amazon into the book lending space is likely to have major ramifications for libraries. Librarians hope it’s for the better, but their early reactions to the news may be more cautious than optimistic.
Photo credits: Austria National Library
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Internet Archive Partners With 150 Libraries to Launch an E-Book Lending Program
Feb 22nd
The Internet Archive, in conjunction with 150 libraries, has rolled out a new 80,000 e-book lending collection today on OpenLibrary.org. This means that library patrons with an OpenLibrary account can check out any of these e-books.
The hope is that this effort will help libraries make the move to digital book lending. “As readers go digital, so are our libraries,” says Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.
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This new digital lending system will allow library patrons to borrow up to 5 e-books at a time for up to 2 weeks. People can choose to borrow either an in-browser version (that can be read via the Internet Archives’ e-reader) or a PDF or ePUB version. The latter will allow readers to access the borrowed books from a number of devices, including iPads, laptops, and libraries’ own computers.
Lending e-books has proven to be quite complicated, for both individual book owners but certainly for libraries. As we have written here before, some publishers have been fearful of the move to digital books, let alone the move to e-book sharing, refusing to allow their books to be made available for lending or only allowing loans with certain on-site restrictions.
The publishers participating in this OpenLibrary project, including Cursor and OR Books, have a very different take on the future of libraries, publishing, and lending. “Libraries are our allies in creating the best range of discovery mechanisms for writers and readers – enabling open and browser-based lending through the Internet Archive means more books for more readers, and we’re thrilled to do our part in achieving that,” says Richard Nash, founder of Cursor.
As a number of startups spring up to take advantage of the lending options available on Kindles and Nook readers, it’s good to see public libraries also moving to embrace e-book lending.
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