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! :)