Visiting the Amazon forums today, I saw a post by one Kindle owner who mentioned a friend of hers wanted to ‘loan’ her some e-books.

The Kindle owner felt that it would be stepping all over the authors’ copyrights. Her friend told her it was no different than loaning a physical book.

Wrong.

You can’t loan an e-book. It’s flat out impossible to do that. In order to share one with a friend, you must reproduce the file and give it to them.

You still have your copy; it’s not missing from your bookshelves like a physical book would be if you loaned one to a friend. You are reproducing and giving away for free a full, complete copy of an author’s copyrighted work.

Not only is it illegal to reproduce a copyrighted work without the copyright holder’s permission, you are also damaging their ability to earn a living from the work in question. Not just damaging, but preventing them from doing so.

You might not think so; what’s one free copy to a friend, right?

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