I think that it's ridiculous that the lent book is unavailable to the original purchaser while it's loaned out. That completely defeats the purpose of an e-book.
Edit:
Do the downvoters disagree on the benefits of having a book in electronic form? Or do they think that the restrictions are not unreasonable/ridiculous?
Why? Otherwise it's piracy. I can't read my copy of the physical book while my friend is borrowing it.
It is a reasonable compromise between amazon and the publishers that will hopefully become better as time goes by. As the publishers become more and more comfortable with it and less concerned that it will destroy their business (e.g. they'll need to adapt) the restrictions will get lighter, much like they did with iTunes.
How is it piracy? They would still have the restriction of a single lending for a single 14-day period.
Right now, my girlfriend and I are reading the same physical book. I read it at work over my lunch break and she reads it at night before going to bed. Is this piracy too?
Sorry, Im generalizing more of how the publisher views it.
I think based on the current connectivity and technology of things this is probably the best compromise they could come up with.
Your girlfriend and I can't read the book at the same physical time (unless you read at the same pace and are at the same point, I suppose). A distributed lock mechanism could be used for it, but it doesn't look like Amazon came up with these terms - the publishers did. See my other comment, but this is the exact same terms which were set on the Nook lending when it came out.
No problems. I get the point, and understand your take on the publisher's views. As someone else mentioned, it's the same growing pains we had to go through with digital music, and there is some frustration that we'll have to deal with the same issues over and over again for each new industry.
My girlfriend and I have already solved the lending issue by sharing a single Amazon account for just our Kindle purchases. Then we both just registered our Kindles to that shared account. The only problem we run into is trying to remember not to "sync to furthest page read" for anything we're both reading at the same time.
> Right now, my girlfriend and I are reading the same physical book. I read it at work over my lunch break and she reads it at night before going to bed. Is this piracy too?
The key concept here is 'excludability'. Only one person (maybe two) can be physically reading it at once. Digital goods, sans DRM, could in theory be shared with pretty much the entire world without depriving anyone of their experience.
This difference between ebooks and 'real' books is the heart of the problem, and why people want to introduce artificial excludability. Actually, I'm fine with that: treat it like a real book in terms of only letting one person at a time have it, but let me freely choose who has it when and for how long.
The whole point of this feature is to make e-books behave slightly more like real books. As it stands normally, you can't share your purchased e-book with anyone — it's prohibited by the terms of use you signed and enforced by DRM. This allows you to share your e-book like you would share a real book (well, once), wherein you can't read the book after you've loaned it out because...you don't have the book.
I realize the point of the feature, but it really is an anti-feature.
It's like if you weren't allowed to skip tracks on a CD, but had to fast-forward through each individual song so that it would be more like a cassette tape.
I've already confirmed that there is a "work-around" for this. Load the book up on your Kindle (or other device). Disable wireless (or other networking). Then perform the loan from your computer.
This way the book will be available on your device (since it doesn't know it's been lent out) and on your friend's device. Just don't re-enable wireless until you're done with the book or the loan has expired.
This way, at least, I was able to share a book with a friend and we could both read it at the same time to discuss it.
Once you're willing to violate the license and terms of service, there are much more thorough solutions: just get a bunch of kindles on a single account and share books (although if you read at the same time, the "read location" syncing could be annoying), or download to computer, rip the copy protection off, and manually load onto kindles, desktops, etc. (and optionally upload to torrent sites, Swedish FTP servers, wikileaks, etc.).
I am personally still at the "I buy books I am interested in even if I won't read them for a while, as long as they're available for Kindle and not more expensive than the paperback, to reward the publisher for making them available on Kindle" stage, but if I were angry at publishers (as I am at the RIAA), the above would seem like a better solution.
> Note - "they should make less money" isn't an answer.
They should make more money isn't a very good answer, either.
eBooks are massively cheaper to distribute, yet we see a minimal discount. Add in the fact that they're limiting lending to once per book when I can lend a physical book infinitely many times and you're looking at higher profits for eBooks than normal books.
The same way that they've been handling it till now. Book lending isn't really a new invention. Even with the turn off the wireless hack, you can have a max of two copies of the book at once. I don't think it's that big a deal.
IMHO, you have an odd notion of what the purpose of an e-book is.
I don't buy or use ebooks because of how convenient it is to copy them and give the copies to other people. I use them because they're more convenient for me.
Edit: Do the downvoters disagree on the benefits of having a book in electronic form? Or do they think that the restrictions are not unreasonable/ridiculous?