The last thing Catherine MacDonald did before going to bed the night of Dec. 30 was to ask her husband to remind her to start a Facebook page the next morning about something she just seen on her Kindle e-reader: Amazon.com’s decision to allow e-book buyers to lend out and borrow certain titles among themselves. Hooked on her newly acquired Kindle, the Malta-based Canadian business consultant and mother of three thought e-book lending was a terrific idea. She set up the page “just to see if this is something a lot of other people want.”
Was it ever: A few weeks later, MacDonald was the harried proprietor of the online Kindle Lending Club, which already has 12,000 registered users making as many as 600 swaps every day. What began as a simple desire to share books with other Kindle users quickly became what MacDonald calls “a crowd-sourced virtual library,” one that functions much like the real thing and is quickly being replicated by similar clubs and startups, all of them inspired by the “lending feature” offered first to users of the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader and then the Kindle.
“It’s always great to launch something people enjoy,” said MacDonald, who recently rebranded her burgeoning club as BookLending.com. “But to have a service that I personally want to use and that I understand the demand for is really very rewarding.”
A few weeks after MacDonald formed the Kindle Lending Club, U.S. distributor BookSwim launched eBook Fling, a sharing site that allows users to swap books from both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The lending feature offered an irresistible low-cost entrance into a booming market, according to company president George Burke. “We don’t have to touch the inventory even,” he said in an interview. “All we have to do is find a lender and a borrower, match them up and ensure that the book gets transferred.”
A screen grab from the Kindle Lending Club www.kindlelendingclub.com: It's still only available in the U.S.
Although the retailer-linked sharing sites are still largely restricted to U.S. users – and Toronto-based Kobo e-reader has yet to offer its own lending feature – they are collectively creating a booming and completely unanticipated market in previously loved electronic literature. In the meantime, established public libraries are quickly bulking up their own e-book collections, a task made easy by wholesalers that not only provide the files but also the systems that control their lending and recovery.
“The increased demand is tremendous, it’s really remarkable,” said Vickery Bowles, director of collections at the Toronto Public Library. E-book lending at the TPL increased 88 per cent in 2009 and 70 per cent in 2010 before going exponential after a Christmas that put millions of new e-readers in the hands of consumers. “E-book lending is still a very small percentage of the whole,” she said, “but that kind of increase in use is obviously very unusual, and a real signal of how things are changing.”
One thing not happening as e-book lending booms is the kind of piracy that accompanied the digitization of other media. Where music and film buffs rip and hack, book lovers so far remain content to borrow temporarily on strict terms dictated by publishers, retailers and librarians, allowing the invisible hand of digital rights management (DRM) to ensure they don’t cheat – and that the borrowed materials “return” to their sources automatically.
