Amazon’s Kindle Team announced on Friday that it plans to make lending for Kindle available “soon.” The feature will allow you to loan your Kindle books to other Kindle devices or Kindle app users for a two-week period. This announcement brings to the Kindle one of the key features touted by the Barnes & Noble Nook: the ability to loan out your eBooks.
But there are restrictions, of course.
Some echo the restrictions of a printed, physical object: While the book is on loan and not on your bookshelf, so to speak, you don’t have access to it. You can’t read it til you get the eBook back. Why the laws of physics must hold for digital texts, I surely do not know.
But some of the restrictions are particular to the eBooks and are likely to frustrate book-lovers and would-be-eBook-sharers:
- Some books will not be available to lend. This will be up to the publisher or the person who holds the rights to the book.
- You can only lend the book once.
Want to pass around your well-worn, well-loved and highly recommended copy of The Illuminatus! Trilogy? (Sorry, that’s just what comes to mind. Probably because someone borrowed my copy and didn’t give it back.) You’d better select that one person who you are certain will actually read it. (I guess you won’t have to worry about them running off with it, though. Hooray.)
These restrictions don’t only apply to the Kindle. The Nook operates with the same set of guidelines. And while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos criticized these limitations in the Nook in a New York Times interview last year, it remains to be seen if the new Kindle lending policies are any more liberal.
No word yet on any eBookseller working on a used eBookstore. But we’ll keep you posted.
