I was poking around on a Facebook group the other day and and found a link to a site called LendInk. I was under the impression it was a pirate site because someone said so. Imagine my ire when I discovered one of my short stories on there! The nerve! Granted, it's a free story anyway, but still!
Ahem. And then I learned it was legit. Amazon is cool with letting some sites share and lend books (at the publisher's discretion). Which means if your book is free on Amazon, it could very well wind up on one of these sites. And if a customer buys it, it could too. These sites are designed to hook up owners and potential readers. You're also able to lend through Nook on the Lendit site.
Update: LendInk has shut down because of angry authors. You can read the full story here.
Apparently there's been a bit of uproar over lending sites, mostly because Amazon is the biggest retail company in . . . I dunno, the world? I think it's safe to say they own the corner on ebook readers and reading.
Recently in the news Amazon pulled the plug on Lendle.me because they didn't agree with what Lendle was doing. They reinstated Lendle's API the very next day because there was massive outrage on Twitter by readers who said they made a lot of their purchases based on books they borrowed through Lendle.
LendInk.com is the site where Clear As Mud, my short story, is posted. I don't know why you'd bother borrowing it, since it is free, unless you don't want the hassle of deleting it yourself.
I found a lot of close author friends on that site. Curious, I turned to Lendle to see if my books were there. Lendle wants you to 'fess up right away and tell you which books you own. I deliberately avoided telling it I own THL through Kindle, but searched for it anyway. I didn't want it getting any ideas from me that I would be willing to lend it.
The whole point of this site is to help "promote" my book. Supposedly when someone borrows it, I get a cut because I'm signed up with KDP Select.
There's no sure-fire way to tell if the borrows on my Amazon KDP dashboard in July were from a friend actually loaning it to another friend or if these loans came from a site like this. It seems to me that as an author, there should be some way I can contact Lendle or LendInk to find out. And that I should completely be able to opt out of their site if I want to.
And here are some other sites in case you want to check them out to find out if your books are there:
http://www.ebookexchange.com/
http://ebookfling.com/
http://www.booksfornooks.com/
Weigh in (especially authors who find themselves on one or both of these sites). Do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing?
When I'm not blogging at Nocturnal Nights, I'm at Have Novel, Will Edit, on Facebook, Twitter and occassionally G+
