Nov 8 2010
Kindle Users Will Have The Option Of Lending Kindle Books In Future
A key factor in the success of the Amazon Kindle Reader has definitely been the huge number of Kindle books on offer for consumers to choose from. There are currently over 725,000 titles for Kindle users to choose from – and that’s just the paid titles. There are also 1.8 million books which are now out of copyright and can be downloaded to the Kindle for free.
Apart from making so much 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.
At the moment, free Kindle apps exist for the Windows PC, the Apple Mac, the iPhone, the iPad, the Blackberry smart phone and any device which runs Android. It almost seems as if Amazon is its own competitor at first glance – but the fact is that all of these free apps are very effective retail outlets for Kindle books.
The latest announcement from Amazon is that Kindle users will soon be able to “lend” each other Kindle books. The date for this is yet to be confirmed, but it will start sometime this year.
Kindle owners will have the option of lending Kindle books to their family and friends for a couple of weeks at a time. The borrower can read the book on their Kindle reader – just as if it was one of their own purchases. 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 suitable for lending. 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 how different publishers react to this development.
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. Initially, the Apple devices will be activated, followed by Android and desktop applications.
Over the last year or so, the ebook reader and ebook market has grown very rapidly. They are still at a relatively early stage in their market development – but the public seem to have become accustomed to them. This latest development by Amazon brings ebooks even closer to the functionality of conventional 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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