Yesterday, we reported with some degree of exasperation that Amazon had shut down the social ebook lending site Lendle for not “serving the principal purpose of driving sales of products and services on the Amazon site.” Good news, though. Today, Lendle’s back in business… presumably after public outcry caused Amazon to backpedal.
Here’s the story. Lendle worked by plugging into your Amazon.com Kindle library. services. It was a free site that did not feature ads. Once you signed up for a Lendle account, you’d sync your Amazon ebook library with it: Lendle would then determine which books were lendable and list them as available for borrowing. If someone wanted to borrow that ebook, Lendle would put them in touch. The idea was that if you lent out one book, you’d be able to borrow some other book you wanted to read from someone else.
A couple days ago, though, Lendle’s Kindle API access was shut off by Amazon. In a no-reply email, Amazon explained the move, saying that it just didn’t see how it was making money off of Lendle… even though the entire service was based around the idea that you had to buy Kindle books in order to borrow them from other people.
Maddening. Amazon seems to have caved, though. They’re now backpedaling, saying that their issue wasn’t with Kindle profitability, but with Lendle’s Book Sync tool, which syncs a user’s Kindle books with their Lendle account. Amazon informed Lendle that if they disabled this feature, their access to the API, as well as their Amazon Associates account, would be reinstated.
That’s great news for Lendle fans, even though the Book Sync tool is pretty much the engine driving the whole service. I think Lendle is taking the right message from all of this, though: it’s folly to try to build a business on a major corporation’s APIs. As Twitter’s recent about-face when it comes to third-party apps shows, building a business off another company’s whims is not a good idea.
Read more at Lendle
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