Amazon and Lendle

Two bits of news and an idea:

Amazon Kindle Owners’ Lending Library now has over 150,000 ebooks

http://www.publiclibraries.com/blog/amazon-kindle-owners-lending-library-now-has-over-150000-ebooks/

“Like someone else’s kid that you only see once in awhile, Amazon’s ebook library is shockingly larger every time you look at it.  As of this writing, there are now 151,636 titles in the list of ebooks in Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

Amazon’s library was born on November 3, 2011 and was the runt of the ebook library litter with only around 5,000 ebooks in it.  At the time, most ebook libraries had far more titles that that in their collections.  But the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library had good genes and a strong appetite.

Amazon fed their baby well and in just 96 days, the library had grown to contain over 100,000 ebooks.  It dwarfed all the other ebook libraries before it was even one month old.  The New York Public Library and its 26,466 ebooks looks like a baby compared to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.”

Part 2:

For sale: Lendle e-book lending service for Amazon Kindle

“The creators of the Lendle e-book lending service for Amazon Kindle put up a “for sale” sign this afternoon in the form of a blog post announcing their intention to find a buyer who can build upon what they’ve created.

“Lendle has always been a huge undertaking, and as our community has grown, so too have our responsibilities,” they write in the post. “On top of all that, two of the three of us have full time jobs outside of running Lendle, and various other ‘living life’ priorities that we would like to focus on.””

“The service launched a little more than a year ago, taking advantage of an Kindle feature that lets people loan books  they’ve purchased to other people they know. Lendle created a community of e-book borrowers and lenders, unaffiliated with any Amazon service, currently offering about 330,000 titles available for borrowing.”

“No word on the asking price. One of Lendle’s co-founders, Jeff Croft, is based in Seattle.””

Sooooo, any brave and visionary and risk seeking consortia or cooperatives out there want to acquire them?

Stephen