EBookFling is Netflix Instant Watch for digital books

It's no secret that users of Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's nook digital book readers can "lend" copies of the books they've purchased to friends.

But imagine if your universe of friends consisted of millions of people, not just the five or six people in your book club. The lending library suddenly becomes much more interesting.

That's what EBookFling wants to create. The site, which officially kicks off Wednesday morning but was up and running Tuesday, ultimately will let users borrow books listed by other members -- for free.

Sounds like a good way to check out authors you might like.

Also, if you haven't already, check what's available online from your local library as digital lending collections grow.

If you enjoy audio books your library can be a great resource for those as well. Ours is a relatively small library and I was surprised at the number of audio books available for download.

There are a lot of books out there and not enough time to read all of them, which is sort of depressing. I am reminded of that old Twilight Zone episode where the one guy survives the nuclear war and stumbles upon a library (despite fact that rest of city is rubble). He is ecstatic that he now has the rest of his life to read but then his glasses fall off and break so now he will not be able to read a thing.

Well even if I live to be 100 years old and read three books a day, I will only get to a very small fraction of the books that are now out there. This is a different situation from just several hundred years ago when it was possible for learned people to read pretty much everything that was in existence.

Supposedly there were a great quantity of books lost during the decline of the Roman civilization. I wonder if any of them were any good. We do have some clay pots that used to contain olive oil and wine.

I think the borrowing is done on credits that you earn by making books available to others to borrow.

Basically a digital version of this:

http://www.paperbackswap.com/index.php

Except that the books you borrow are only available to you on your device for 14 days.

“the borrowing is done on credits that you earn by making books available to others to borrow.”

Unless I misunderstand the model, the credit system simply ensures there are no pure free-riders who only borrow, but never buy. But if 100 people each buy a different book and lend it out to the other 99, then each of the 100 will end up reading 100 books while purchasing only 1 copy. So unless the system somehow caps how many times a purchased book is lent out, I don’t see how the economics work.

Unlike a lending library whose lending is constrained by the physical availability of books and need for customers to physically pick up and return books, a virtual system would hypothetically allow 300 million Americans to buy 300 million different books and lend these all to one another.

Again, every book would be bought only once, providing the author with royalties of say, $8, but after that, all the remaining readers of that book would be borrowers rather than purchasers. Do you know of any authors willing to write books for which they are paid $8? There may be some, but they aren’t likely to be particularly high quality etc.

This thing seems like it’s ripe for a copyright lawsuit. I’m not sure of all of the legal implications involved here, but the most basic concern to me seems to have been brought on one of the above posts: If you deprive the author/publisher of any continued profits, pretty soon you won’t have much to read.

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