Amazon launches Kindle Owners' Lending Library
by Steven Mostyn - Nov 3 2011, 12:37
Image: Amazon.
Good news for those of you who use Amazon Prime and own a Kindle electronic reader: Amazon has this week whipped the covers off its Kindle book-lending service.
“The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a great new benefit for Kindle owners and an entirely new growth opportunity for authors and publishers,” trumpeted Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle Content.
“With this launch, we expect three immediate results: Kindle owners will read even more, publisher revenues will grow, and authors will see larger royalty checks,” he added.
Beyond boasting an initial selection of 5,000 publications, the digital Kindle library will also enable customers to have loan-based access to more than 100 current and former titles from the New York Times Bestseller list.
Of course, plucking books from the library isn’t entirely ‘free’ and, in order to use it, Kindle owners must also be subscribers to Amazon’s Prime service, which costs $79 USD per year.
On the up side, that monetary outlay enables readers to loan books without a time limit—although only a single title can be lent out at any one time.
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