Amazon Will Soon Allow Kindle Users To Lend E-Books

According to this announcement from Amazon, the Kindle will soon be updated to allow users to lend books to friends and family. Lending for Kindle will allow you to loan your Kindle books to other Kindle device or Kindle app users for a loan period of 14 days.

The lender will not be able read the book during the loan period. And not all e-books in the Kindle Store will be lendable; this will be decided by the publisher or the rights holder to the work. Interestingly, Barnes and Noble’s e-reader, the Nook, has been allowing lending for some time now. Like Amazon’s upcoming lending feature, LendMe also allows users to lend books for a 14 day period.

The details of how the Kindle’s new lending feature will work are still unclear. B&N’s LendMe allows users to send books to a friend’s Nook, computer, or Nook app.

Also included in today’s post is news that Amazon will be making Kindle newspapers and magazines readable on its Kindle apps. the feature will be rolled out first on iOS apps, and then on Android and other apps soon. As the statement says, Amazon ‘s “vision is Buy Once, Read Everywhere,” and this will allow users to access their magazines and newspapers on all of their devices.

This could be a big deal for Amazon, because it will allow iPad owners who use the Kindle App to read the newspapers and magazine they’ve subscribed to on the application, as opposed to using other apps or even the mobile web on the tablet device.