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Amazon pulls the plug on Lendle.me

Mar 21st, 2011
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
Comments are off for this post

UPDATE – 3/23/2011- Lendle.me is back up! Hooray.

Lendle.me, one of the new and very popular ebook lending services, was shut down today. Amazon has pulled the plug on them. The API that connects them to the Amazon database has been revoked. According the a @lendleapp tweet, Amazon said Lendle doesn’t “serve the principal purpose of driving sales of products and services on the Amazon site.” Other lending sites have also had their API pulled according to this statement from Lendle.

Lendle has said they’ll find a way to rebuild their service if their API isn’t restored and they’ll continue to lend ebooks. (hooray!)

Is this a smart move by Amazon or short sighted? Are the pondering getting into this business themselves? Will Barnes & Noble follow suit with their Nook books? Frankly, if I were a bookseller, I’d want that the swapping to be happening right on my own website, where I can keep my customer’s eyeballs on other products.

Read through some of the lendle tweets today and you’ll find many people saying they’ve actually bought more ebooks as a result of the book lending sites. I’m one of them! (more…)

Kindle & Nook Book Lending

Feb 5th, 2011
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
4 comments

When Amazon added the ability to loan some purchased Kindle ebooks, I knew it wouldn’t be long before we saw some new services to help people borrow & lend titles.  A month later, there are several operating or in development.

While I love the idea of being able to loan the few books I’ve purchased, the restriction on loaning a title only once will turn me into more of a hoarder than a lender. If I’m going to loan a title that I really enjoyed, I want to loan it to a friend, a good friend. And not just any good friend, but that one very good friend who will love the book the most. And the one who can get through it in the limited 14 days. Don’t bother loaning me anything, I’m a slow reader.

(Of course this all begs the issue of where libraries fit in this picture! Visit, and lend your support to, Library Renewal for information and discussions around that essential question.)

Nevertheless, with the help of Bobbi Newman’s list of ebook loaning services as a starting place, I decided to check out some of the services.

Kindle Lending  Club – (changed name to BookLending)

This service grew out of Facebook page started on December 31,2010 by Kindle user Catherine MacDonald and has a very easy to use interface. Sign in with your Facebook account or register with your email. (more…)

Night Owls

Feb 3rd, 2011
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
1 comment

What a great idea!  Night Owls -  Cuyahoga County (OH) Public Library’s after-hours book discussion is held on Thursday evenings in the Notes section of their Facebook page. There were about a dozen folks there tonight sharing their latest reads.

101 Free Tech Books!

Dec 19th, 2010
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
1 comment

101FreeTechBooks gives away 101 free books every month. It’s simple – you sign up for this free service, create a wish list of tech books and you might just win one of them in their monthly raffle. Certainly worth a few minutes of your time, tech books are pricey! The selection is impressively extensive. I quickly found a dozen books I wouldn’t mind owning, some that I was looking at in the bookstore just last week.

I discovered this service today via Nicole Engard’s What I Learned Today site. She says she received a free book within a month of signing up. So, game on! I want some books too. Thanks Nicole!

After you sign up, you can earn more ‘raffle tickets’ by checking out their Facebook page for promo codes. But first click on my link to their site, so I can earn more raffle tickets. I’m not too proud to beg! :-)

Books selected by your neighbors

Jan 5th, 2010
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
11 comments

What a fun idea from Half Hollow Hills Community Library.

“We invite our patrons to display their favorite books, authors, music, or movies to share with their neighbors.”

More info: Read Like Larry


What your neighbor Larry selected
Originally uploaded by HHHCL

Your weeded books can do some good

Jun 5th, 2009
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
2 comments

Elisabeth Abarbanel wrote a great post about what they do with books they weed at her library. Many of them are donated to Better World Books. Read  her post for details. This could be a great volunteer project for kids and adults. 

(Thanks to Buffy Hamilton for noting this  on Facebook)

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