Lending me Kindle

One of the main criticisms of e-books over paper books is how easy it is to lend a paper book to a friend.

To be honest that is a fair and valid point. Publishers it would appear would much rather prefer if the secondhand book market didn’t exist and that everyone bought their own copy of any book they wanted to read. I always think that is slightly short-sighted as I know when I lent out copies of The Colour Of Magic, people would go out and buy other books by Terry Pratchett. Hey I must have bought about four copies of The Colour of Magic myself as after lending my copy out and not getting it back I wanted my own copy. As with music I am inspired by others.

However of course with the current way in which e-books are bought and sold I can’t lend an e-book. I could lend my Kindle or e-book reader, but there are certain issues with that (as whoever has my Kindle can buy books).

However Amazon recognising the value that lending books has, have announced a new feature for the Kindle.

…later this year, 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.

So it isn’t as far as I would like it to go and you still can’t permanently transfer titles from one Kindle to another, however this is a start.

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