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Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Books Amazon to Allow Kindle Library Loans

Posted by Paul Constant on Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 11:14 AM

Amazon has finally decided to allow Kindle users to borrow e-books from libraries.

The Seattle-based retail giant did not specify when its "Kindle Library Lending" program would start, but the company did say that the perks of reading a purchased e-book on a Kindle e-reading device or through a Kindle app will be in place — such as syncing of notes across Kindle apps and readers, finding the last page read and highlighting of text.

Given how vocal Kindle users can be, I would expect libraries to start getting a whole lot of demands that they beef up their e-book collections real soon, now.

Comments (7) RSS

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this is good news for kindle owners...though, if you don't actually own the stuff you download, anyway, i can't imagine why anyone would actually buy an ebook if they could just get it from the library.

Posted by AmyC on April 20, 2011 at 11:19 AM

note that you can run the Kindle books app on your iPad and crack the DRM that way too.

All your root is belong to China.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on April 20, 2011 at 11:24 AM

Not that this has anything more than tangential relevance to this topic, when looking for a useful library I look up, within its catalog, the author "Sturtevant." If the library fails to have any hits anything to do with Hittite, I don't go there. I don't even do Hittite. Edgar H Sturtevant was one of the great Anatolian scholars back in an age when the US actually compared with the European in terms of ancient language philology; the refusal or inability to stock his books is symptomatic of incompetence.

Posted by Central Scrutinizer on April 20, 2011 at 11:42 AM

So, I guess I would like to see the "Comparative Grammar of the Hittite Language" become readily available online through such venues. As it stands, there are very few remaining copies of its sole 1935 printing; it is the only useful English-language resource for pedagogy in this matter; and it remains authoritative to this day.

Posted by Central Scrutinizer on April 20, 2011 at 11:45 AM

@1,

You have less than a month to read library e-books, which makes them pretty useless for me in many cases.

Posted by keshmeshi on April 20, 2011 at 12:04 PM

@5 pretty much the same for normal books, so why is that bad?

Posted by Will in Seattle

on April 20, 2011 at 12:11 PM

Kindle lending will be through Overdrive only for now, which means a lot of libraries will take a pass. Overdrive is a headache, has terrible terms, and has crappy customer service. It will be interesting to see how it works, but in this budget climate, I don't imagine libraries will be clamoring to subscribe to Overdrive just because of this.

Posted by kj on April 24, 2011 at 8:57 PM