eBook Readers Might Not Spell the Death of Libraries After All

Amazon have now launched their latest salvo in the eBook wars, allowing people to borrow eBooks much like we’ve been doing with libraries for hundreds of years.

The books can only be loaned once however and for a maximum period of 14 days.  You can read loaned books on a Kindle or in any Kindle App.  These are available for a variety of devices including Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone.

Not all books will be available for lending, this will depend on the publishers providing permission for Amazon to do so.  There’s also precious little information on whether this will be a free service or what charges may be payable, again we can probably assume this will vary depending on the book and publisher.

This is an interesting move from Amazon and, while it was broadly expected at some point, it will be an interesting move to watch to see how it affects eBook sales.  It is widely considered that Libraries have been good for overall book sales in recent years, so will this move do the same for eBook sales?

You can read more at the Amazon website.

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Author: Mike Halsey MVP, Friday December 31, 2010 -
Tags:amazon, ebook, kindle

Responses so far:

1. Jojo says:

   December 31, 2010 at 9:32 pm

   This is an idea that I thought about years ago when e-book readers first started coming out!

   Once everything in the world is digitized, there would no longer be any need for physical libraries.

   Now if only the world worked like this comic: :)

   http://xkcd.com/827/

   Reply
2. Roman ShaRP says:

   January 1, 2011 at 2:45 am

   I’m not impressed by that:

   There are plenty of e-book readers without DRM (about 20 models from more than 12 vendors), Russian e-book shops selling hot titles in Russian in 14 formats without DRM, and Russian e-libraries with more than 150.000 titles free to copy (I don’t care if it is legal). So, we here don’t need any permission from Amazon.

   I think it’s a shame for people to bow to rightholders tyranny, having far less options than people who treat e-books like mp3s and use and copy them any way they want.

   Reply
3. Kobo Fan says:

   March 13, 2011 at 2:08 pm

   Many public libraries in the US allow you to borrow eBooks onto your eReader but the Amazon Kindle doesn’t support this ePub format – shame on them! I wish they would as it would make libraries more used.

   Reply