Your Kindle 3 and your other Kindles will soon get a Nook LendMe type feature that lets you lend books once. The key details -
- Each book can be lent only once.
- The loan can be for a maximum of 14 days.
- You can’t read your book while you’ve lent it.
- Publishers determine if books are lendable.
- Feature arrives sometime in 2010.
An official announcement at the kindle forum about the new Kindle Lending feature -
Second, 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.
It’s a rather limited feature – Guess Amazon has grown tired of people thinking Nook allows ‘ebook lending’ when it’s a severely limited and rather unhelpful feature. Their solution – introduce an equally limited and equally pointless lending feature.
Thanks to CrunchGear for catching the news.
Kindle newspapers and magazines available on Kindle Apps
The other news in the announcement is that Kindle for Android, Kindle for iPhone, and other Kindle apps will in the near future become capable of delivering newspapers and magazines.
Here’s what Amazon has to say -
First, 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, and then we’ll be adding this functionality to Kindle for Android and our other apps down the road.
It clearly seems that Amazon is selling more books via Kindle for iPad and Kindle for iPhone than via Kindle for Android. There’s no other reason why it would start magazine delivery on the iWhatever apps and leave out Android (at least initially).
In the thread people are pointing out that the lack of support for library books is a bigger issue than the two listed above and that’s a very valid point. There are also comments about the prices of magazine and newspaper subscriptions beginning to veer into Cuckoo-Land and that’s another valid point.
Filed under: kindle Tagged: | lending kindle
“It’s a severely limited and rather unhelpful feature.”
True.
Two articles with an obvious connection.
If I remember correctly, the Nook is an Android box. (One of the selling points of the Nook is that — eventually — you’ll be able to run Android apps on it.) Let’s assume that the Color Nook is a real, color eReader rather than just another tablet. I could easily see people buying the Color Nook, and then downloading Kindle for Android and sticking with the Amazon ecosystem, except on a color eInk screen.
Amazon looses the quick hardware sale, but keeps all those long term customers. Not a bad deal for Amazon, especially if B&N is selling the Color Nook at a loss.
Of course, this all assumes that the Color Nook actually is an eReader and that they eventually open up to Android Apps.
14days is nuts.
Lending doesn’t really interest me, especially when it’s so limited. I’d really like to be able to give away ebooks though, especially those that I received for free.
Before my daughter got her Amazon account, I downloaded several YA ebooks that were free. Since you can’t filter your library if you share an account, I can’t share them with her and I can’t give them to her.
Accessing library ebooks is the other must-have feature, since my parents are mostly library users and don’t buy books, I’ll end up getting them a Nook or Kobo instead of a Kindle. Short-sighted on Amazon’s part.
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