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Don’t believe the hype about lending ebooks on the Barnes & Noble nook

11.09.09 | 1 Comment

Here, I fixed that for you.

If you’ve read reviews about the nook, the new Kindle competitor from Barnes & Noble, you may have heard that you can lend ebooks to friends. But don’t get suckered in by this claim. Barnes & Noble is conveniently leaving out some crucial information about how the process works, and it turns out the “loan your book” feature is a lot less useful than most bloggers and journalists are making it sound.

So how does the lending feature work? Barnes & Noble doesn’t provide a lot of detail on it–the Nook promo page on barnesandnoble.com simply says the device “lets you loan eBooks to friends, free of charge.” Naturally your friends will also all have to have registered nooks to participate, but I’ll assume that’s evident to most consumers.

But here’s the trickier part. Some readers over at the MobileRead forums asked Barnes & Noble to clarify how lending would work, and they found out the following details:

  • You can only lend an ebook if the publisher allows it; this can be turned off exactly like how publishers can turn off the text-to-speech feature on Kindle titles.
  • You can only lend an ebook out for 14 days maximum.
  • You can only lend an ebookonce; after that, lending is permanently disabled on the title.

The first condition is ridiculous, but I don’t want to hijack my own post just to rail some more about stupid/greedy publishers. Some people won’t have a problem with the other two conditions, either because their friends are fast readers or because they rarely lend physical copies of books more than once. But for the rest of us, watch out. For example, say you loan your mom your copy of The Road and she doesn’t finish it within that 2 week window; she’ll have to go buy her own copy to get through the last few chapters. You won’t be able to lend it to her for a second 14-day period, and you’ll never be able to lend it to anyone else ever again, either.

Barnes & Noble could make this feature actually usable with just a couple of small changes. They could expand the lending window to 30 days, plenty of time for most people to get through an average book. More useful, they could expand the number of times you can loan out a book, say to five instances. That would provide enough flexibility so that you and your friend can decide how long the loan should last.

But it’s unlikely Barnes & Noble will bother. You see, the real point of this feature isn’t for customers at all–it’s for Barnes & Noble, because it gives the company a ton of positive, free press: “Wow, the nook lets you lend books! The Kindle doesn’t do that!”

So take all the hype with a grain of salt, and remember that if you want to really find out the details of a new device these days, look on forums and message boards. That’s where actual target customers are likely to come together and ask the hard questions, even if the media doesn’t.

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