A few words about Lendink

Recently, a lot of us learned of an ebook-borrowing site called Lendink. What a stir it caused, with twisted knickers everywhere, including my own. All three of my titles were listed as being available on the site. They weren't going to charge for borrowing, so what were they doing? Stealing our work? The site had a hard-to-read FAQ page explaining among other things that they didn't maintain copies of the books or even the covers. All they were doing--or attempting--was to match up owners of books with others who might want to borrow them.

Hmmm. Can you spell trouble? How about L-e-n-d-i-n-k? Amazon has its own policies regarding borrowing, and of course we authors want a say in what happens to our works. It wasn't totally clear to me whether Lendink maintained any connection with Amazon, so I wrote Amazon. Here is their reply dated August 3:


Hello,

We have not authorized lendink.com to loan your book and have not provided your file to them.

If you've found your work available on an unauthorized website such as lendink.com, we suggest contacting that website to confirm your rights and request removal of your work. If you distribute your book through other sales channels, you might contact them to inquire as to whether they have authorized the inclusion of your book on lendink.com.

Our lending program allows a purchaser to lend a title once and does not allow the recipient to re-loan that book. For more information about Kindle book lending, check out this page:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200549320&#loan

I hope this helps. Thanks for using Amazon KDP.