Today, kindle launched a new service that allows you to lend books to friends. It is called their book loaning program. It allows a person who has purchased an ebook through the kindle store to loan it to their friend. Its a nifty service that allows you to let other people read books you currently have finished. I think this is a positive step for the E-book industry, as with real books, you are able to lend them to whomever you want. And, like a real book, when you loan out a book through the kindle store, you are unable to read it until the loan expires. How long is that? Well, when you initiate a loan, an email is sent to the recipient (who doesn’t need to own a kindle by the way). That email has 7 days to be acknowledged. After you acknowledge the email by clicking on the link you are provided, you then have 14 days to read the book. During that period, the person who lent the book out is unable to read it. Once the loan period is over though, the person who lended the book automatically gets access again, and the person whom it was lent too loses access. There is a courtesy email sent 3 days before this happens to remind you to hurry up and read it, because your about to lose it. This seems like a great service, but like the text to speech function, not all books have this option to lend available. If you don’t see the option on the book on the website, then its not there. It doesnt look like this feature is available in the kindle, which is a let down, but hopefully with future updates, we will see this added to the firmware.
