Nov 3 2010
Kindle Owners Will Have The Option Of Lending Kindle Books In Future
A major factor in the success of the Amazon Kindle Reader has undoubtedly been the huge number of Kindle titles on offer for consumers to choose from. At this time, Kindle owners can choose from more than 725,000 paid titles. Amazon also has 1.8 million books which are out of copyright and can be downloaded to the Kindle gratis.
As well as making huge volumes of reading material available for Kindle owners, Amazon has definitely made every effort to make it easy to read Kindle books even if they don’t have a Kindle reader. This has been achieved by the release of a number of free Kindle apps which allow Kindle books to be read on a variety of different devices.
Currently, there are free Kindle apps for the Windows PC, the Apple Mac, any device which runs the Android Operating System, the iPhone, the iPad and the Blackberry smart phone. At first glance, it almost appears as if Amazon is setting up in competition to itself, but the truth of the matter is that each of these apps acts as a retail outlet for Kindle books.
Amazon has just announced that, in the near future, Kindle owners will be able to lend each other ebooks. Amazon has not confirmed the date for this yet – but it should start before the end of the year.
Users will have the possibility of lending Kindle books that they’ve enjoyed to their friends and family for a fortnight at a time. The “borrower” will be able to read the book on their Kindle – just as if it was one of their own books. The original buyer won’t be able to access the book for the duration of the loan. Just like a real book in fact.
Not all books will be lendable. The publishing houses will have the last word as to whether or not the Kindle version of their books may be lent out or not. It will be interesting to see if the publishing houses react differently to this.
Amazon has also advised that all of the devices for which free Kindle apps exist, will soon have support for newspapers and magazines as well as Kindle books. The Apple devices will be activated first, followed by desktop applications and Android devices.
Over the last eighteen months or so, the ebook reader and ebook market has exploded. The ebook market is still developing – but the public seems to have accepted ebooks already. This latest development by Amazon makes e-books even more like traditional books. You can now do just about everything with an e-book that you can with a conventional book – apart from dog-earing the pages that is. It’s another significant step forward for ebooks and ebook readers and will help them to become even more widely accepted by the reading public.
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