Amazon to Provide Library Lending for Kindle

Amazon's Lending Library will let both Kindle owners and Kindle app users access e-book titles from their local library. Photo: Amazon.com

Sometimes you need a book, but you don’t necessarily want to buy it.

That’s what libraries were great for (remember those?). You could check out a book — say, if you needed it for a research paper, or weren’t sure if it was something you actually wanted to shell out money for — and then you return it.

Dealing with e-books has made the whole process much more simple (in general), but sometimes, you still don’t actually want to buy that e-book you’re only going to use once.

Solution: Amazon has announced that they?ll be launching a Lending Library so Kindle owners and Kindle app users can check out books from their local library.

In December, Amazon added two-week Kindle-to-Kindle lending for its users, but it required publisher approval for titles to be included in the lending program, and wouldn’t allow the e-book owner to access the title until the two-week trial was up. The Nook had a similar-style lending feature before that.

The Lending Library program will debut with over 11,000 library participants and will work with both Kindle devices and free Kindle apps. To help accomplish this, Amazon is working in partnership with a company called OverDrive, which provides access to digital content for school and public libraries.

One great feature about the program is that you?ll be able to take notes in the margins, like a real book. When your rental is up, the notes will disappear from the library’s copy because they?re stored privately. But if you check out the e-book out again, or decide to purchase it, your annotations will reappear along with any bookmarks you made.

Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library is set to launch “later this year.”

Kindle Library Lending [Amazon via RWW]

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