Chapter 14. Lending and Borrowing Books on Your NOOK Using LendMe

To keep readers from sharing ebooks with all their friends, publishers usually protect ebooks with digital rights management (DRM), which ties an ebook to an individual, and unless that individual can prove that he is an authorized reader, the ebook will not open.

DRM is one of the reasons some people don’t like ebooks. After all, when readers find a good read, they like to pass it on to friends and family. The number of people with whom you can share a physical book is fairly limited, but because ebooks are digital copies of a book, they can literally be shared with millions of people quite easily via email, Facebook, and any number of other methods.

One of the unique features that B&N added to your NOOK is the ability to lend some ebooks to other readers using the LendMe feature. Although there are some serious restrictions when lending and borrowing books, the LendMe feature is a step in the right direction.

Lending Books with LendMe

To lend a book to someone, the book must support LendMe. Not all books do. If a book does support lending, you see the LendMe logo on the book’s page on bn.com, as shown in Figure 14.1. You also see the LendMe banner on the book’s cover in the Library on your NOOK and in the NOOK App.

Figure 14.1 The LendMe logo appears on a book’s page at bn.com if the book is lendable.

To lend a book to someone using LendMe, follow these steps:

1. Browse to the book on your NOOK, and double-tap the cover to see the Details screen.

2. Tap LendMe. The LendMe screen appears.

3. Tap Contacts to select someone from your contacts, or tap Facebook to send the offer via Facebook.

4. Tap Next.

5. Tap Select a Contact to add a contact to receive this LendMe offer; select the contact and tap Done. Type a message to send with the lend invitation. (The message is optional.). The same goes for Facebook LendMe offers, but Select a Contact is instead Select Friend.

6. Tap Send or Post.

Your NOOK then displays a message that it’s taking care of your LendMe request. When that message disappears, you’re taken back to your Library.

Choose carefully when lending a book because after you lend a book, you can never lend that particular book to anyone again. However, a book is considered to be on loan only if your friend accepts the LendMe offer. If your friend rejects the offer or if she allows the offer to expire without accepting it, you can lend the book again after it’s returned to My Library.

The person to whom you’ve loaned the ebook has 7 days to accept the loan offer. If she doesn’t accept within 7 days, the book is returned to your library. The loan offer can also be rejected, in which case the book is returned to your library immediately.

You see notifications in the status bar about your loaned ebook if your friend accepts the loan offer or rejects the loan offer and when the loaned book has been automatically returned to your library. Loan offers and notifications are visible on the status bar and on your NOOK.

While an ebook is loaned, On Loan appears next to the title in the Library and you cannot read the book. When you loan a book, you also loan your DRM rights to the book. Only one person can possess the DRM rights to a book at any one time, so you need to wait until the book is returned to your library before you can read the book again.

There are many reports of LendMe emails not ever being received. In my use of the LendMe feature, I have experienced this on two occasions. In these situations, your friend might use the NOOK for PC app or My NOOK Library on bn.com to accept or reject the offer. In some cases, however, the offer doesn’t appear in the NOOK App or My NOOK Library. B&N’s answer to this problem is to wait for 7 days when the loan offer expires and then lend the book again. There isn’t a way to force a re-send of the offer email, and there’s no way to cancel the offer.

Borrowing Books

When a friend lends you a book, you can see the loan offer in the status bar (or in your NOOK App or on the NOOK Color and via email, and so on). You have 7 days to either accept the offer or reject it. You can accept or reject the loan offer from your NOOK.

If you accept a loan offer from your NOOK, that book is also available for the loan period in the NOOK Apps, NOOK Color, and vice versa. However, if you accept the offer from the NOOK App and then try to read the book on your NOOK, your NOOK might not realize that you’ve accepted the offer and might ask you to accept the offer again. When you do, the LendMe request will fail, and you’ll see a message telling you that the LendMe request was not successful. When this happens, tap the Synch button from the Library, and your NOOK synchronizes with the loan offer you accepted in the NOOK App. You can then read the book you were loaned without any problems.

You can determine how much time is left on your loan period by tapping Library from the Quick Nav Bar and tapping LendMe from the Type drop-down list. The banner on the cover shows the time left. If you don’t finish the book within the loan period, you can buy the book (or go into a B&N store and read in the store). When you buy a book that was lent to you, the lent copy is immediately returned to your friend.