Amazon ups the e-book Ante: Free Kindle Lending Library for Prime Members

[rockymtnhigh]

Just saw this when I went to the Amazon home page this morning:

Dear Customers,

Today we're announcing a new benefit for Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership: the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

Kindle owners can now choose from thousands of books to borrow for free, including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers — as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. No other e-reader or ebook store offers such a service.


The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library features a wide array of popular titles, including Water for Elephants, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, and Fast Food Nation – plus award-winning novels such as The Finkler Question, motivational books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, biographies and memoirs including Kitchen Confidential, and Pulitzer Prize-winning books like Guns, Germs, and Steel.

We’re adding the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to Prime membership at no extra cost — Amazon Prime remains just $79 a year, which gives you free two-day shipping on millions of products, plus unlimited instant streaming of almost 13,000 movies and TV shows.

They are seriously providing some incentives for folks to own and use a Kindle (and not just read Kindle content on an iPad or other non-Amazon device). From what I can tell you can only borrow from a e-ink Kindle or a Kindle Fire. The idea of having free access to thousands of books, including NYTimes Best sellers, is impressive. How on earth they negotiated that with the evil empire I call the trade publishers is beyond me.

The question is will Barnes and Noble -- or Apple -- find a way to respond to this.

I need to get my Kindle back from my kid and try this out.

 

[lparsons21]

That is a very nice benefit to the Kindle. And Amazon is working hard to make Prime a better offering and succeeding!

 

[klang]

This article: Amazon Launching E-Book Lending Library - WSJ.com says, not surprisingly, that the big six publishing houses are not participating at this time. They might come around. Seems to me if you give someone a taste of an authors work they might start buying that author.

 

[Ilya]

And Amazon also claims that you can lend e-books from your local library. Has anyone tried that with a Kindle?

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[KE4EST]

And Amazon also claims that you can lend e-books from your local library. Has anyone tried that with a Kindle?

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Not heard of anyone trying this either, interesting.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

And Amazon also claims that you can lend e-books from your local library. Has anyone tried that with a Kindle?

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EDIT: I misread this question -- I have a friend whose library supports it. And has done it.

I thought you were talking about lending from your personal library (or archive) of Kindle books!!!

Only some books are lendable, but yeah, I have done it. You do it through the Manage Your Kindle page on the Amazon website. Works real well. Once the book is lent, it temporarily disappears from your kindle, and then comes back when it is returned, or when the 14 days is over.

The neat thing about the online Kindle lending library is there is no deadline. No idea how many books you can borrow at once.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Oh, and I tried it out this morning on my wife's kindle. My kid has mine at school. He uses it for his English class when they have reading time.

 

[klang]

The neat thing about the online Kindle lending library is there is no deadline. No idea how many books you can borrow at once.

The WSJ article says one book once a month.

 

[Ilya]

I meant to say "borrow" books from a library.

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[rockymtnhigh]

I meant to say "borrow" books from a library.

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Yeah, that's why I edited my post. You said it properly, I just read it differently.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Confirmed: one at a time, and one per month. Still, that means once a month you can download a free book that would not ordinarily be free. I'll take it.

 

[avg1joe]

I have borrowed from the library with my kindle. If you have a wifi kindle you can beam it directly to the kindle (from your computer or your router, not sure?) but I have a 3g kindle which is generally great but for library borrowing you have to download to your computer and then transfer by usb cable to the kindle 3g.

 

[Ilya]

I have borrowed from the library with my kindle. If you have a wifi kindle you can beam it directly to the kindle (from your computer or your router, not sure?) but I have a 3g kindle which is generally great but for library borrowing you have to download to your computer and then transfer by usb cable to the kindle 3g.

I am confused. I thought Kindle 3G had Wi-Fi as well. Or is is it 3G only?

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[dangue]

It has wifi as well. I would normally check this out, but I have loaned my kindle to a friend and am relegated to only using my iPad for reading ebooks.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

I have borrowed from the library with my kindle. If you have a wifi kindle you can beam it directly to the kindle (from your computer or your router, not sure?) but I have a 3g kindle which is generally great but for library borrowing you have to download to your computer and then transfer by usb cable to the kindle 3g.

Your 3G kindle has wi-fi if it is the 3rd generation device. If you have a K1 or K2 then yeah, that is not possible.


BUT my question is more about the process. At your public library if you want to borrow a kindle book, you have to transfer it from a computer there to your Kindle?

 

[avg1joe]

I have a 2nd generation 3G only kindle. Library lending (around here anyway) is done through the Overdrive company. You login by telling the website what local library you have a card with and imputing your library card number. Then, from home, I download the book to my computer and transfer via usb cable to the kindle. I'm not sure if the wifi kindles download directly to the kindle or just use wifi to transfer from the computer to the kindle. Either way you do not need to be anywhere near your library to do this.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

I have a 2nd generation 3G only kindle. Library lending (around here anyway) is done through the Overdrive company. You login by telling the website what local library you have a card with and imputing your library card number. Then, from home, I download the book to my computer and transfer via usb cable to the kindle. I'm not sure if the wifi kindles download directly to the kindle or just use wifi to transfer from the computer to the kindle. Either way you do not need to be anywhere near your library to do this.

Cool. I was unclear how this lending system worked.

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