PhilMur's thoughts on biz/tech/money/life

Barnes & Noble’s highly anticipated ebook reader, the nook, boasts a variety of features that B&N says makes it superior to the Kindle device made by Amazon.

I received one as a gift for Christmas, and while I am still awaiting its arrival, I’ve done a good bit of reading about the device.  Overall, it sounds like a great device but like any 1st/2nd generation product, the nook should be expected to have its share of imperfections and unfinished features.

One of these unfinished features is the nook’s ability to lend out books, but only temporarily, to other Nook users.  According to the clarification from B&N as stated on the nook blog nookTalk (on Twitter as @nookTalk, “the books you buy for your nook can only be loaned out ONCE for fourteen days.”  This “one-lend-only-and-just-for-14-days” feature, in my mind, makes this feature more hype than substance.  How often do you borrow a book from a friend and return it 14 days later?  And how often have you lent out a book multiple times to various friends you have who you think should read the book, or read enough of it to be interested in purchasing it themselves?  How frustrating would it be to only have the ability to lend the book out one time, and never again?

Admittedly, the nook’s ability to lend books at all is better than the Amazon Kindle’s lack of a lending feature.  And I imagine there’s plenty of business, partner/copyright, and technology issues at play here that prevented a more relaxed lending feature at this time, but here is my question: why not allow the process of lending an e-book to occur in essentially the same way as the lending of physical books works?

Here are my specific suggestions on how to loosen up the technology to better emulate real-life book lending, while also (somewhat) protecting content creators’ copyrights, their royalties, and the publisher’s/distributors’ revenues.  These suggestions could be implemented by any of the e-book / e-reader companies:

1. Extend the time limit of lending. This is an obvious problem; I would propose they extend the time limit at least to 60 or 90 days, but preferably to something closer to 6 months.  This only makes sense, as a physical book lent out can sometimes stay gone for a while.
2. Do not allow the owner of the e-book to read it while it is “lent out”. This may be disappointing to e-book users, but it does accurately match what happens with physical books and thereby provides some protection to content providers’ copyright and distribution concerns.
3. Implement automatic reversion of the reading rights. As a way of preventing the scenario we have all experienced where you lend a book to someone, but it turns out to be a gift to them (because they never return it!), the devices would ideally revoke reading rights to the book on the lender’s device/account after the lending time limit is up, and return those reading rights to the e-book owner.  Update: I heard from @nookTalk shortly after publishing this post that this feature “should work” currently.  Thanks for the info!
4. Allow for upgrades / “full license” purchase of ebooks to remove or relax restrictions – Apple has already done a similar thing with their music, often offering a non-protected version of songs on iTunes for $1.29 instead of the standard $0.99 per song price, for example.  So, an e-book that normally sells for $9.99 could sell for, say, $14.99 in an unprotected format that might have relaxed lending restrictions (even longer lending, lending to more than 2 or 3 people and simultaneous access to the book yourself, etc.)  This would calm the critics and ensure that people could have more flexibility if they paid more for the e-book– probably something closer to the cost of what the physical book would cost in the store.
5. Implement a “lending friends” list – Thankfully, my understanding is that the nook does allow multiple  accounts (I’m not sure of how many, but I am sure it’s comparable to the Kindle’s 6 account limit) to have access to the same books.  This should assuage any concerns about members of the same household being able to access each other’s books.  But my LENDING friends list that I suggest essentially works the same way, except that the list of accounts can be larger and is used for the lending feature only, not for unlimited normal access to your library.  This again would somewhat of a limiting feature to users, but would be a mitigating protection for B&N and publishers.  If you, for example, can only lend any of your books to someone on a list of 10 different for example, this will limit the odds that lending will be so easy as for some to avoid purchasing books altogether.

I am hopeful — and confident — that as the e-book technology improves and technology creators, authors, and publishers come to grips with the radical changes that will be coming to their industry with the rise of e-books, there will also be an eventual improvement and standardization of features such as e-book lending across all devices.  Hopefully these suggestions here will help to kick-start the discussion.