Digital Book Sharing Hits Amazon Kindle

The Amazon Kindle is the hottest eReader out there by many accounts with the device selling in droves to people that like to read and don’t want to go to the store to buy new books. The Kindle was a big part of the reason the eReader market has seen such resurgence in the last few years.

Amazon has announced the availability of a new Kindle feature that allows the owner to loan books on their personal device to another reader for 14-days. The catch to the service is that the book can only be loaned out once and the book owner can’t read the book while it is loaned out. The other big catch is that only users in the U.S. can loan books and depending on the usage restrictions on the digital content, users in other countries may not be able to receive a book loan.

It would seem that loaning books via digital formats would be a non-issue since physical books have been loanable since the invention of the written word. Digital content providers are very keen to squeeze all of the value they can out of digital books so the loan period is short and very limited. Only a few select titles are loanable as well, the publisher has to specifically allow loaning of the title.

The books can be loaned to users on the Kindle or any platform where the Kindle app is supported. If you offer a loan to a person and they don’t accept, the missed loan doesn't count as your single chance to share. Books and the loan status can be checked on the Manage Your Kindle page.

Barnes & Noble already allows books to be shared with its Nook.

Amazon recently announced that the Kindle was the best selling item ever on its site.

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