For those of you that use the Amazon Kindle platform or are in the market for a new eBook reader and have yet to make up your mind then this development may pique your interest.
In a nutshell, one Amazon Kindle user can lend out a book to another Amazon Kindle user for a period of up to fourteen days. Just like dead tree books, you can farm them out to friends and family that might like to read them at no additional cost. This is great if you have several avid readers in a household as you can bounce around one copy of the book amongst everyone without having to shell out for additional copies.
However, Amazon have given publishers the ability to choose whether or not a book can be lent out. This is a potential downside that may affect more popular titles so that publishers can extract the most profit before they reach a plateau in sales. It remains to be seen how publishers choose to wield this control over their titles.
The other great thing is that book lending is agnostic of the device used to read an Amazon eBook whether it be the homegrown Kindle, the PC or MacOS X readers or the readers available for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, BlackBerry and Android devices.
Book lending and receipt can be managed through the “Manage Your Kindle” section. It’s also worth noting that international publishing rights for books can be somewhat fragmented so whilst this will work in most cases with titles shared and accepted within the USA if the sending or receiving party reside outside of the USA your mileage may vary. Furthermore, once you lend a book out you cannot read it until the recipient deletes it from within “Manage Your Kindle” or the fourteen day loan expires.
I reckon Apple and other competitors have something to learn from Amazon – there is still plenty of fight left in the eBook arena.
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