There is a lot of reaction on the source by indie authors, including Hugh Howey, on kboards :

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,189900.0.html

Genius. Booked.

I believe the HN community is seeing this solution through the eyes of someone that may be a bit more advanced than some possible target audiences.

Of course you have a fast computer. Of course you have a configured mail client (non web based). Of course you get your email client.

But what about the rest of the world?

People that have slow computers? Find programs (in general) intimidating and confusing? Are lucky enough to be able to browse the web?

What is easier for those people?

A modal that pops up immediately upon clicking asking what they would like to say or waiting for Outlook to load?

In contrast to more feature rich services like Wufoo or Jotform, it's simple, modern and it appears to work.

I say this is a viable service.

+1 for me.

A lot of this criticism is also assuming everyone is using their own computers. At a couple of places I've worked, we could store our files on a network drive but we got a fresh instance of Windows each time. Mailto links would bring up the Outlook Express setup wizard, which was pointless to go through considering it would simply be wiped again when you logged out.

On top of that, I know my mom, still fearful of Firefox, let alone Chrome, has a similar problem with mailto links and it is always quite excruciating watching her process for extracting just the email link itself without the mailto: attached to the front. Depending on who this is marketed to, I think some businesses could easily increase conversions by going this route.

Starting March 1st, Amazon is going to cut affiliate fees for sites that have a heavy focus on promoting free Kindle books and fit the following criteria :

“In addition, notwithstanding the advertising fee rates described on this page or anything to the contrary contained in this Operating Agreement, if we determine you are primarily promoting free Kindle eBooks (i.e., eBooks for which the customer purchase price is $0.00), YOU WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE TO EARN ANY ADVERTISING FEES DURING ANY MONTH IN WHICH YOU MEET THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS:

(a) 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links; and (b) At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks.”

I run such a site and it will be interesting to see what happens next. I fully expect many of the sites that exist today will no longer exist in a months time. Or, they will look to promote other platforms (IE: Apple, Nook, etc).

What may be more interesting is what will this do to the authors and the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) offerings? What will be the new incentives that Amazon will offer up? And will authors still promote their books for free?

(I say yes and the trend will move to "perma-free" . Books that are always free to hook a reader. IE, the first of a series, character, etc...)

I tried my best to defend this site. I was in the thick of it with many of the authors that frankly were quite simply, technically challenged as to how the site would work.

I was in the accusation threads on Kindleboards ..

You can see a lot of the back and forth there. It was really spiraling out of control. So much so, it was ripe for disruption (it likely still is) as many of the authors were (and are) looking for methods to have essentially DMCA takedown notices on cruise control.

(seriously, there seems to be a big market for this amongst the indie authors that don't have a handle on some of the more technical and copyright issues at hand. ps. if anyone wants to know more or talk through ideas, reach out.)

Anyway, I put forth quite a bit about how the whole Amazon associate world works (in plain terms) and how other sites, that have been around much longer and were MUCH bigger (no offense LendInk) such as lendle.me (which if memory serves had their site name challenged because they got on the amazon radar back in the day).

I dunno.. I was pretty amazed to see how quickly it all unfolded and how others jumped on board without a full understanding of how the site functions worked.

Sorry to hear about the whole situation. I have a site in the same space (but not lending) and its unfortunate to see the door closed on what could be a very good (and profitable) promotional engine for both the site and the book authors.

EDIT : a bit more of the backstory

I can add something valuable from being a part of the thread. A big problem for some of the early authors was that their books were NOT available to be lent (as per author -- I didn't verify).

ASSUMING this was accurate of some of the initial outraged authors and not the "hey get my book down" others that came along in time, I put forth the idea in multiple threads that perhaps the devs of the site got too much data in a sweep via the API.

In other words, they didn't bother to get books that were available to be loaned. And, did just a big sweep across the Amazon API looking for any and all Kindle books.

Somewhat makes sense -- the more books, the more opportunity for affiliate tag clicks. And, it probably errors out (or did) saying this book is not eligible. I believe an author even confirmed this early on.

It was this simple oversight that REALLY added the fuel to the fire.

Hope that gives some additional insight to those that weren't part of the madness.

Enjoy! :)

The other thing to keep in mind is if their page has any "accelerated fans" (read : purchased bot page likes), any time they promote a post, they would be promoting to the same bots that liked the page in the first place.

No accusations, but, just food for thought.

I don't really know how purchased page likes work, but why would that matter? Bots / fake accounts used to generate likes have no reason to keep running and click on ads?