This is sad. The Lendink website, a place where book-lovers could connect and share lend-enabled e-books they had bought on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, was shut down by a mob of angry (and remarkably ignorant) book authors who mistook the site for a piracy hub.

It gets sadder: the site, which had been running on auto-pilot for years as its curator was battling health issues, was created by disabled army vet Dale Porter in the hope that it would generate "passive income from Amazon's Affiliate program."

Borrowing lend-enabled Kindle and Nook e-books is perfectly legitimate, as spelled out on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble Web sites; book e-tailers have a series of permissions in place where publishers can allow a 14-day lend of a purchased book between customers. (Amazon notes that "not all books are lendable -- it is up to the publisher or rights holder to determine which titles are eligible for lending.")

But to a few virulently righteous individuals, this was not a new model for library science, but a hotbed of peer-to-peer piracy that had to be stopped at any cost.

The whole ugly scene is reminiscent of when an angry mob in Britain vandalized a pediatrician's office when they thought the word on the doctor's office sign meant "pedophile."

When it became obvious that no actual piracy was taking place on the site and that everything was perfectly legal, the authors continued on their stance that they did the right thing.