There are days when I love the Internet. It’s been less than 24 hours since Amazon rolled out ebook lending, and already there are half a dozen places online where you can lend and borrow Kindle titles with complete strangers.
I imagine some Kindle owners would balk at public lending, either because they want to reserve their one-time-only loans for friends or because they don’t like the idea of sharing email addresses with strangers. But for those willing to participate, it could provide lots of free reading.
If this sort of thing takes off–and especially if some of the mainstream websites pick up on this in the next couple of news cycles–then I can imagine lots of big publishers will refuse to turn on lending (if they haven’t already). In the end, we may all end up grateful that Amazon is making lending a default feature for most books published through its DTP system.
Enough blather! Here are the sites I’ve found so far. As I discover more, I’ll add them to the post. (You can also keep track of this Mobileread thread for additional updates.) Good luck finding something to read!
Update 31 Dec 2010: I want to save this information in a more permanent location, so I’ve added a category called “Lending Websites” to the Free Ebooks page. After today, the list below will not be as current as the one on the Free Ebooks page.
- Kindle
- KindleLend at Reddit
- GalleyCat’s facebook page
- Kindle Book Lending Club on facebook
- KindleLendingClub on facebook
- Kindle Lending at Goodreads (thanks Nick!)
- BooksForMyKindle
- BlogKindle
By the way, Barnes & Noble has had this feature for a year, and there are already Nook lending libraries like the ones above. Here are two courtesy of The Digital Reader. If you know of any more, please let me know.
(Photo: CCAC North Library)
By Kindle users already forming community lending libraries December 30, 2010 - 9:48 PM
[...] by Chris Walters [...]
By Nick Senger December 30, 2010 - 11:23 PM
Goodreads also has a Kindle lending group:
http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/40792.Kindle_Lending
By Brian Hartman December 30, 2010 - 11:24 PM
Thanks for the write-up on the Kindle Book Lending Club! I started it so that people could take advantage of this great feature. Hopefully we’ll get lots of users.
As for the publishers: I think the limitation of being able to lend only once per book should be enough to safeguard their revenues for the books. And I know that I personally would be much more willing to buy a book from someone who understands the book culture enough to know that lending someone a book can turn that person on to an author, and garner further sales. (Not to mention the fact that two weeks isn’t too long to read some books.)
By Tweets that mention Want to lend and borrow Kindle books with strangers? Here are four places: -- Topsy.com December 31, 2010 - 4:53 AM
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Anne Peoples, Booksprung. Booksprung said: Want to lend and borrow Kindle books with strangers? Here are four places: http://bksp.me/hXrOWP [...]
By Catherine March 6, 2011 - 12:27 PM
Hi, just wanted to update you to let you know that we have rebranded Kindle Lending Club to http://www.BookLending.com (and our new Facebook page is http://www.Facebook.com/BookLending — we’re a friendly bunch and always welcome new faces!