If you’ve read reviews about the nook, the new Kindle competitor from Barnes & Noble, you may have heard that you can lend ebooks to friends. But don’t get suckered in by this claim. Barnes & Noble is conveniently leaving out some crucial information about how the process works, and it turns out the “loan your book” feature is a lot less useful than most bloggers and journalists are making it sound.

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It looks like publishers have finally accepted the idea of e-readers being a legitimate part of the book market, judging by their comments at this year’s Frankfurter Book Fair, according to Reuters:

Penguin publishers Chief Executive John Makinson told Reuters: “They have become mainstream in the sense that they are a genuine consumer product for which there is real appetite, so this is not the province of geeks any longer.”

Makinson said Penguin was now publishing all new titles both as printed books and e-books and was digitalizing its backlist.

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