In October , Amazon promised that drug user would be able to lend Kindle book of account to each other by the end of the twelvemonth , and the retail giant star has at last delivered that feature of speech — just under the wire . On Thursday , the company softly update its e - book organization tosupport lendingtitles .
Like its major lending - enabled competitor , Barnes & Noble ’s Nook , you may loan some Kindle titles to a supporter for 14 day . However , the arrangement comes with its clean portion of limitation : you’re able to only lend each title out once , the original proprietor ca n’t read it while it ’s loan out , and the only championship uncommitted for lending are those that publishing house have explicitly take for eligible . Those titles that can be shared will be explicitly marked on their product Page .
Kindle deed of conveyance - sharing is not available just to owners of the hardware e - reader equipment , but to users of Kindle software on Mac , PC , iPad , iPhone , BlackBerry , and Android . alas , only customers subsist in the U.S. can loan out a claim ; outside users may or may not be capable to accept loans , depending on the publishing rights of the form of address in their various body politic .
To share a book , you may either loan it from the Manage Your Kindle page on Amazon ’s internet site , or from the product page of a rule book you ’ve already buy . In both casing , you specify an e - mail computer address for the person you want to portion out with — that individual then has seven days to take the loan , after which the item reverts back to your possession ( fortunately , an unaccepted loanword does n’t count against your boundary of one loan per title ) . you may view the status of your loans via the Manage Your Kindle page on Amazon ’s site , and the borrower will be notified three days before the end of the loan period by a good manners e - mail .
With Amazon and Barnes & Noble having implemented communion functionality , it seems like only a issue of meter before Apple follow suit with its iBookstore titles . in person , I ’d wish to see Apple examine and leapfrog its competitors by getting publishers to relax the individual - loan restriction — to my mind , this is one place where e - books arelessconvenient than their forcible counterparts . But digital content providers have tended to be pretty scrimpy in these scenario , so I say I should n’t be hold my breathing space for the entirety of 2011 .
