The creators of the Lendle e-book lending service for Amazon Kindle put up a “for sale” sign this afternoon in the form of a blog post announcing their intention to find a buyer who can build upon what they’ve created.
“Lendle has always been a huge undertaking, and as our community has grown, so too have our responsibilities,” they write in the post. “On top of all that, two of the three of us have full time jobs outside of running Lendle, and various other ‘living life’ priorities that we would like to focus on.”
“We don’t want any of that to get in the way of the customer service we expect of ourselves, and we don’t want our additional workload to have an effect on potential new features or the overall Lendle experience, either.”
The service launched a little more than a year ago, taking advantage of an Kindle feature that lets people loan books they’ve purchased to other people they know. Lendle created a community of e-book borrowers and lenders, unaffiliated with any Amazon service, currently offering about 330,000 titles available for borrowing.
“Lendle means a lot to us. We’ve put over a year of our lives into growing a great community and implementing new features and we’ve done our best to put a unique spin on social-lending to ensure that Lendle stands out amongst the competition,” they write. “Even so, there’s still a vast untapped market for social-lending that is millions of potential Lendlers strong, and we think a nimble and innovative home for Lendle can only lead to great things. ”
No word on the asking price. One of Lendle’s co-founders, Jeff Croft, is based in Seattle.
The service had its API access revoked and then restored by Amazon last year.
