E-book Lending Comes to Kindle
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It was only a matter of time before Amazon took B&N Nook’s main advantage away. Kindle fans have always wanted to have a chance to share their books with fellow book lovers. Amazon has listened:
we will be introducing lending for Kindle, a new feature that lets you loan your Kindle books to other Kindle device or Kindle app users. Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period. Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable – this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.
This is certainly not perfect. For starters, could you imagine lending your book for 14 days and not having a way to get your hands on it during that period? Perhaps a better approach would be to limit the number of concurrent readers in the lending period. Besides, if lenders can’t read the books they have lent, why limit the number of times they can lend them to a specific individual?
All e-books won’t be lendable, and it will be up to publishers to make that possible. Can you imagine publishers forbidding their hardcover book buyers from lending their books? This is an exciting development, but nook and Kindle have a long way to go in this area.
nook won’t be dead even though it has lost another advantage it has held over Kindle for quite some time. B&N is expected to innovate and bring a color screen device to the market. Amazon is determined to keep Kindle as the number one e-book reader on the market. That means other players will need to step up their game even further. That’s good news for consumers and publishers.
In a related news, Amazon is bringing magazines and newspapers to its free Kindle apps:
we are making Kindle newspapers and magazines readable on our free Kindle apps, so you can always read Kindle periodicals even if you don’t have your Kindle with you or don’t yet own a Kindle. In the coming weeks, many newspapers and magazines will be available on our Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch
Amazon has stepped up its game in the past few months. However, these silly e-book restrictions need to stop if these companies want more people to fully adopt e-books.
Your turn: Are you excited about e-book lending coming to Kindle?
