Kindle Users Will Soon Be Able To Lend Kindle Books

A major factor in the enormous success of Amazon’s Kindle Reader has always been the number of Kindle titles on offer for users to choose from. Currently, Kindle owners can choose from more than 725,000 Kindle books – and that’s just the paid titles. There are also 1.8 million books which are out of copyright and can be downloaded to the Kindle gratis.

Apart from making plenty of reading material available for Kindle users, Amazon has also made every effort to make it easy to read Kindle books without 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 this time, there are free Kindle apps for the Windows PC, the Apple Mac, any device which runs the Android Operating System, the iPad, the iPhone and Blackberry’s smart phone. 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. This should start before the end of the year – although Amazon has not yet confirmed the exact date.

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” 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. Precisely the same as with a traditional book in fact.

Not all books will be lendable. The final decision as to whether or not books may be lent out will rest with the publishers. It will be interesting to see how different publishers react to this development.

Amazon has also confirmed that it will its current free Kindle apps will be extended to include 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 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 makes e-books even more like traditional books. Ebooks can now be considered to be pretty much interchangeable with traditional books – apart from the fact that you can’t mark the pages with a dog-ear. It’s a big step forward for both ebook readers and ebooks readers, and it’s one which can only will help them to become ever more widely accepted by the public.