http://www.macworld.com/article/159351/2011/04/kindle_lending_library.html
Amazon announces the Kindle Lending Library
by Lex Friedman, Macworld.com Apr 20, 2011 10:18 am
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E-book lending, periodicals reading in apps coming to Kindle
Amazon on Wednesday announced that later this year it will launch the Kindle Lending Library, a feature that will allow Kindle customers to borrow books from 11,000 libraries across the United States. The Kindle Lending Library—which Amazon is forming in partnership with digital media distributor OverDrive—will work with all Kindles, and all Kindle apps, including the Mac and iOS editions.
Once the feature launches, customers will be able to borrow Kindle e-books from their local libraries and start reading them instantly. If you check out a Kindle book a second time, or later purchase your own copy from Amazon, you don’t lose any notes and bookmarks you’ve added; they remain linked to your Amazon account. (And, in an advantage over old-school paper-and-binding books, you can make as many notes on your e-copy as you like without mucking up the book for the next person to borrow it.)
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The Gooferment and its “copyright” diktats have and will muddle this technology.
* Copyrights are now a centuries lock on the information. Weren’t patents and copyright supposed to expire and allow the public to benefit? Wasn’t, isn’t, that the only reason for giving an author a monopoly?
* Publishers allow books to go out of print. Disney puts stuff “back in the vault”. And, some copyrights have their ownership lost in time.
* A library, or a person, can “loan” or sell their copy. (The doctrine of “first sale” and all this “software licensing” nonsense.) Why is an ebook different?
* Libraries should be restricted to loaning out a single copy of e-books at a time as they would be with paper books. There shouldn’t be question.
* “Expiration”, like when publisher HarperCollins changed its agreement with OverDrive, dictating that its e-books should “expire” after 26 checkouts. That’s just wrong.
Did I miss anything?
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