I’ve long been a proponent of the ability to transfer digital content licenses — not only is it obviously good for us consumers, in mirroring the ways we traditionally manage physical media, but I believe it also benefits rights holders by staving off piracy and building loyalty. While we’ve yet to see many mainstream implementations, Amazon will be following in Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-book footsteps when they unveil Kindle content sharing functionality later this year:
Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period. Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable – this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.
The terms are somewhat restrictive, but it’s a reasonable start. Assuming the publishers play along… I have my doubts after some decided $9.99 isn’t a fair price for content that requires no shelf space and costs effectively pennies to duplicate and distribute. On a personal note, I’ve sidestepped the issue of digital lending by purchasing a Kindle 3 for Mom… who will keep my virtual bookshelf fully stocked.
The timing of the pre-announcement is interesting… given rumors of a color B&N Nook launching next week.
Does this mean the free public library ebooks will be available to Kindle?
Not sure how or if that will happen… I can’t imagine the publishers would be in favor of that though, depending on scale.
too restrictive for me. I will keep buying the cheaper paperbacks or borrowing from the library.
I don’t really know anyone with a Kindle — will there likely be trading posts to bring people together?
Good call, we’re going to need a community to swap books.
Also, a notable comment from Dale Dietrich on Twitter, who I’ve discussed this topic with many times over the years:
I won’t be happy til we can sell/give away like paper books
That is freaking awesome! One of the main problems of Kindle versus books was that you could not lend books to other kindles. I can’t wait for this feature.
I have Nook which features lending and a lot of books, especially new/popular titles, aren’t lendable. I don’t think Amazon will be able to change publishers’ minds.
The idea of secondary rental marketplace/matchmaking (even if it’s free) is pretty intriguing. Since there’s no dangers in lending an e-book (unlike physical book, it’ll be returned automagically), I’d be down for that. Probably, most difficult part would be scraping library information from Amazon/B&N (and it may be necessary to do that periodically as, presumably, lending function can be turned off and on at any time).