Amazon Launches New Kindle Lending Library
Could the future availability of e-books look more like Netflix than a bookstore? Amazon is pointing to at least one possible future, with its new, free e-lending program for Kindle.
On Wednesday, the giant retailer announced the launch of its Kindle Owners' Lending Library for customers with an Amazon Prime membership. Kindle-owning members can now borrow any of thousands of book titles in the Library for free. The selections include over a hundred current or former New York Times bestsellers, and the frequency can be as much as a book a month. There are no due dates for the "return."
Bookmarks Saved
Amazon points out that no other e-reader or e-bookstore offers such a deal, which is getting close to the subscription model offered by Netflix for movies. The free Lending Library option is included in the Prime membership, whose $79 annual fee also includes free two-day shipping and unlimited streaming of about 13,000 movies and TV shows.
Titles in the new lending library include Michael Lewis' Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Big Short, Liars' Poker, Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy, Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, and Stephen R. Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Notes, highlights, and bookmarks made in the loaned e-book are saved, and will re-appear if the book is bought or borrowed again. Books are borrowed and returned from a given Kindle device.
Amazon said that, for most titles, it has reached a fixed fee agreement for a given number of titles from a publisher. In other cases, Amazon pays a standard wholesale price to the publisher each time a book is borrowed, in an effort to show the revenue opportunity for publishers, but at no risk to them.
'Very Creative'
Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle Content, said in a statement that his company expects "three immediate results: Kindle owners will read even more, publisher revenue will grow, and authors will see larger royalty checks."
The Lending Library complements another program that Amazon announced in September, a program in which Kindle device owners can borrow e-books from more than 11,000 public libraries in the U.S.
Kindle users will also be able to do something with the public library e-books that libraries normally everywhere discourage -- writing in the margins. As with the borrowed e-books in the free Lending Library, borrowed public library books will allow notes, highlights and bookmarks to be always backed up and available the next time the book is checked out, or if it is later purchased from Amazon.
Laura DiDio of Information Technology Intelligence Corp. called Amazon's new Lending Library "very creative, very edgy," adding that it is more evidence of "Amazon's ingenuity in the highly competitive market" of e-readers.
She predicted Amazon's e-book loan efforts will help to differentiate the device, and that the publishing industry, "which is now in a state of revolution," could well develop a tiered system of releases that more resembles the movie industry.
