From an Article in The Globe and Mail (Canada):
Although the retailer-linked sharing sites [e.g. Kindle Lending Club and eBook Fling] are still largely restricted to U.S. users – and Toronto-based Kobo e-reader has yet to offer its own lending feature – they are collectively creating a booming and completely unanticipated market in previously loved electronic literature. In the meantime, established public libraries are quickly bulking up their own e-book collections, a task made easy by wholesalers that not only provide the files but also the systems that control their lending and recovery.
“The increased demand is tremendous, it’s really remarkable,” said Vickery Bowles, director of collections at the Toronto Public Library. E-book lending at the TPL increased 88 per cent in 2009 and 70 per cent in 2010 before going exponential after a Christmas that put millions of new e-readers in the hands of consumers. “E-book lending is still a very small percentage of the whole,” she said, “but that kind of increase in use is obviously very unusual, and a real signal of how things are changing.”
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“We have a long history of loaning electronic materials and it hasn’t been compromised,” the TPL’s Bowles said. Publishers may be nervous due to the experience of the music industry, she added, but the public benefit of e-book lending is clear.
“It is extending access to these wonderful materials,” she said. “That’s what’s really exciting about it.”
Good to hear about this. I’m not convinced that piracy will die, but I do like the ability to share a book with someone.
Image, DRM-free tag?
All the legitimate ebook lending schemes mentioned rely on DRM, as made clear in the article.