Penguin Group yanks e-books from library lending services

Major book publishing company Penguin Group has pulled all of its ebooks from Amazon’s Kindle Library Lending program today, reports The Digital Shift.

Amazon forged a partnership with e-book distributor Overdrive’s system for its digital book lending program, which allows people to borrow books for a limited time. The Overdrive system is also used for several other e-book lending programs.

Penguin, however, claims Overdrive’s system isn’t secure enough and fears that it would enable piracy — thus causing the company to yank its entire library of titles as well as halt releases for digital versions of new books.

“We have always placed a high value on the role that libraries can play in connecting our authors with our readers,” the Penguin Group said in a statement. “However, due to new concerns about the security of our digital editions, we find it necessary to delay the availability of our new titles in the digital format while we resolve these concerns with our business partners.”

So people across the country will have woken up to find that the books they’d been digitally borrowing from the library are no longer available. According to The Digital Shift’s report, librarians weren’t given any notice of the book publisher’s actions.

While I understand the company’s concern about piracy, yanking all their books on short notice seems like an overreaction.

Did you find an e-book unavailable due to Penguin’s piracy fears about library lending? Let us know in the comments.

[Via PaidContent]