Kindle owners now have another reason to shell out $79 per year for an Amazon Prime subscription: Amazon's new Kindle Owner's Lending Library. Those who own any of Amazon's eInk Kindles or the Kindle Fire are now able to borrow books directly from Amazon as long as they're Amazon Prime members, giving them access to some 5,000 e-books at launch, including more than a hundred current and former New York Times bestsellers. The best part: there's no due date.
According to Amazon, users will be able to electronically "borrow" up to one book per month and "return" it whenever they please—there are no "rush through your book in 10 days!" restrictions here. The main caveat is that users can only take out one book at a time, but with the unlimited borrowing window, that's a fair concession to make. The other caveat is that the Lending Library won't be accessible from Amazon's plethora of Kindle apps for other platforms such as iOS, Android, and BlackBerry—it's restricted to hardware Kindles only.
The idea is a bold one, and Amazon makes sure to emphasize that "no other e-reader or e-bookstore offers such a service." Indeed that is true for the time being, though truthfully, Amazon's selection of books that the masses will actually want to read is still relatively small. As noted by the Wall Street Journal, none of the six largest US publishers are participating in the program yet, and several executives reportedly said they believed such a service might harm future sales of older titles.
Amazon is still trying to woo them, though, and has made the uncharacteristic move of publishing its terms up front for the world to see. According to the company, Amazon has reached an agreement with many publishers to include their books in the Lending Library for a fixed fee, but in some cases, Amazon is actually purchasing each title from the publisher every single time it is borrowed. This is in order to "demonstrate to publishers the incremental growth and revenue opportunity that this new service presents."
From the consumer side, the Lending Library adds some attractive value to Amazon Prime. Originally introduced as a service to offer free or reduced two-day shipping on items ordered from Amazon, Prime recently gained Netflix-like video streaming abilities. Now, with the addition of what essentially amounts to "free books" for no additional price increase, that $79 per year is becoming an even better deal.
For the time being, though, it seems likely that readers who want to borrow an even wider variety of Kindle books may find a better selection via their own local libraries. In September of this year, Amazon began a partnership with thousands of US libraries to begin lending e-books—most of those are due back within 7-14 days, but obviously don't require you to pay a yearly membership to Amazon. (In a recent hands-on with the service, we found the library lending system to be "clunky, but awesome.")
Listing image by Photograph by CCAC North Library
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