One of the most enduring criticisms of the Amazon Kindle is that unlike its closest competitors Nook and Kobo, it doesn’t let you read library books. With today’s press release from Amazon, that looks like it’s going to change “later this year.”
As usual with these sorts of announcements, there are no explicit details about when this will be rolled out, or how it will work. Presumably OverDrive will start offering a Kindle-compatible format, and it will remain the library’s decision to purchase ebook licenses from various publishers.
For the most part, this is just bringing some parity to the Kindle format so that it’s better positioned against the epub format used by Nook and Kobo. However, Amazon does mention one cool added feature that epubs don’t offer: private backups of your notes and highlights.
If a Kindle book is checked out again or that book is purchased from Amazon, all of a customer’s annotations and bookmarks will be preserved.
[Amazon Kindle director Jay Marine says] “We’re extending our Whispersync technology so that you can highlight and add margin notes to Kindle books you check out from your local library. Your notes will not show up when the next patron checks out the book. But if you check out the book again, or subsequently buy it, your notes will be there just as you left them.”
What Marine doesn’t mention of course is that if a publisher turns off notes and highlights, this won’t work. I ran into such a title last week from Hachette. But then again, that title isn’t currently available as an OverDrive ebook at my local library anyway, so unsynced notes might be less a problem than underfunded libraries and expensive library licenses.
Side note: If you read most of your books these days on a Kindle or Kindle app, and your local library starts offering Kindle ebooks, would that prompt you to support it more? I just realized as I typed the previous paragraph that I’d actually be willing to donate money to my local library if I could check out Kindle files.
“Amazon to Launch Library Lending for Kindle Books” [Amazon]
(Photo: jandrosantana)
By ziad April 20, 2011 - 11:06 AM
Amazon is really being innovative here. They still don’t support ePub files, but they are giving Kindle users more reasons not to care anymore. The problem is that there is often a long waiting list for borrowing books from libraries because of limited licenses.