Posts Tagged ‘share ebooks’

There have been many questions surrounding the Barnes & Noble Nook and book loaning. Someone over at the Barnes & Noble help board asked the question:

The FAQ says, “You can lend many of your eBooks one time for a maximum of 14 days.” Does this mean you can only loan the book out once, PERIOD, and once you have loaned out a book you can NEVER loan it out again, even after the 14 day loan period expires?

The reply from Kristin S. (administrator) is this:

Yes, that’s correct. You can loan each eBook (providing the publisher allows this) one time only, for a period of 14 days, to any B&N eReader-supported device, including nook, Mac, PC, iPhone, iPod Touch, and BlackBerry. During this time you cannot read the eBook yourself. Hope that helps, and thanks for your question.

As I suspected, the lending feature is indeed dependent on publishers allowing their books to be shared, much like the kindle Text to Speech feature is dependent on publishers. Given the current attitude of many publishers towards e-books, I wonder just how many will be allowing their books to be shared? On top of that you can only share it once of the lifetime of owning that book? And only for 14 days? Yes many of us bookaholics read a book in a day or two, but most mortals need more than 14 days to finish a book. It will be interesting to see how this feature plays out once the device is released.

A couple more posts related to the post shared yesterday about reader rights ~
Readers Have Copyright Rights Too by Dear Author

Tessa Dare » Please, share my books!.

Courtney Milan has an interesting blog post up about reader rights and ebooks.

I really do wish there was a way to share kindlebooks with friends as we do with paperbacks/hardbacks. The closest thing I could come up with is a “email to friend” function on the kindle. when you choose to email a book to a friend (with a kindle address or similar) it would then delete the book off your kindle and send to your friend, therefore you are truly passing on the book and not reproducing it.