LendInk

» see lendink.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

LendInk was built for a group i was not in. Its users were Kindle owners on American accounts and self-publishing writers, people who cared about a lending permission that only existed inside one retailer's store in one country. In 2011 i was in Ankara reading technical material on a screen and buying paper for everything else. The site never had a reason to reach me and it never did.

The mechanism it sat on top of was real and narrow. When Amazon opened Kindle Direct Publishing, it tied a lending right to the royalty choice: pick the seventy percent rate and your book became lendable, pick thirty-five and you could opt in or out. A lend ran fourteen days and could happen once per copy, ever. Barnes and Noble had a version of the same thing on the Nook.

Dale Porter, a disabled US Army veteran, noticed that the permission existed and that nothing helped people use it. LendInk let an owner list a lendable book and let a borrower email that owner through the site. The actual loan happened entirely inside Amazon's or Barnes and Noble's software. If a title was not authorized for lending, the option was grayed out and the site refused to list it. There were no files on the server and no revenue coming in.

At the start of August 2012 somebody opened LendInk, saw their own book title on a page they did not recognize, and drew the obvious wrong conclusion. That reading went to Twitter and then through the self-published author networks, where it stopped being a claim and became a known fact. The takedown notices went to Porter's hosting company rather than to him. Somewhere in the hundreds, according to what he said afterward, and the host had no interest in reading terms of service to work out who was right. The site was suspended inside three days.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

Every author who filed against LendInk had chosen the lending permission themselves. It was a checkbox on a form they had filled out at Amazon, attached to the royalty rate most of them picked because it paid double. The site was not routing around their decision, it was executing it. A fair number of them found this out afterward and said so in public, which is more than usually happens.

There was money in it too, in the direction nobody expected. A lent Kindle book is not a lost sale in the way a copied file is. Several writers pointed out that borrowers who liked a book went and bought the next one, and that the campaign had removed a discovery channel their own royalties ran through. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association put out a piece about it in the middle of the month, and the phrase that stuck to the whole affair was that a lot of people had skipped the reading step.

~ the ten months after ~

Porter got the site back. A crowdfunding effort covered the hosting and LendInk reopened on 24 August 2012, three weeks after it went down. Takedown notices kept arriving, most of them from people who still had not checked. He was in poor health and the thing had never earned him anything. In June 2013 he let the GoDaddy hosting lapse. That is the actual death: not the mob, but the ten months afterward where a free service run by one sick man was still absorbing legal threats for a feature Amazon had shipped.

No lawsuit was ever filed against it. Nothing was ever proven, because there was nothing to prove. A permitted, unpaid service was removed from the internet by volume of complaint alone, and the only mechanism that made that possible was a hosting company that finds it cheaper to switch a customer off than to read.

~ what it left ~

The specific hole never got filled. Amazon still allows the fourteen-day lend and there is still no good way to find someone willing to do it, because nobody wants to build the thing that got a veteran's website destroyed for being legal. The permission sits in the terms, technically alive, practically unusable.

The transferable lesson is about the notice system rather than about books. A takedown notice costs the sender nothing and costs the recipient their site. When enough people who are sincerely wrong send one at the same time, the outcome is identical to what happens when someone who is right sends one. LendInk is the cleanest case of that on record because the facts were never in dispute for even a day.

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