Lendle.me Quietly Removed Payments for Lending

One of the mostly underutilized features of the Kindle is book lending.  About 30 percent of my books are lendable.  Lending is a bit of a pain.  You only can lend a book once.  And you only have 2 weeks to read the book before it expires.  The larger problem is figuring out what to borrow.  Unless you have lots of friends with kindles and you talk with one another about books, then it is difficult to know where to borrow a kindle book.

This is the problem that book sharing websites are trying to solve.  Book Sharing sites like Lendle.me, allow you to put the books you are willing to lend and then to search for books you would like to borrow.  I have reviewed Lendle.me and Booklending.com before, but Lendle.me recently changed owners.

While there is not much visually different, the site seems to be a bit faster, the emails you get from Lendle include advertising and most importantly, Lendle has very quietly removed the small payments for lending. It used to be that you would get anywhere from $0.02 to as much as $2.50 for lending a book.  I have loaned about 120 books and received around $50 in Amazon gift cards for lending.  The amount is not a big deal, but it was a nice bonus for the site.

I do not know if there will be other changes or how the loss of the payments will affect lenders willingness to lend.  But it is still a decent service that can help you find books for free and try books you are not ready to purchase on your own.

It does not cost anything to sign up for the site.  All that you need to do is offer some of your lendable books to gain credits, which allow you to borrow books.