The list of borrowable ebooks in Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library has grown to over 65,000 titles. The list includes over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers as well.
Amazon has added around 60,000 titles in just under two months. There were around 5,000 ebooks that were available in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library when Amazon launched it on November 3, 2011. That is quite impressive growth over such a short period of time.
Of course, you have to own a Kindle and you have to be an Amazon Prime subscriber to be able to borrow the books, but it’s quite a selection of titles. By comparison, the largest public library in the United States, the New York Public Library, has about 23,500 different ebook titles available for its members to borrow.
Kindles and Kindle Fires were very hot items this holiday season. Amazon said they sold about a million of the devices a week leading up to Christmas. It looks like anyone that got a Kindle for Christmas also got a much larger selection of free ebooks to borrow from Amazon as well.
And don’t forget, those 23,500 books at the NYPL only check out to one reader at a time, whereas Kindle’s 66,200+ titles can each simultaneously be loaned to as many Prime customers as want them. The current Kindle lending library limitation of one book per calendar month will almost certainly be expanded to more generous terms (perhaps with “prime” Prime pricing involved) until it begins to resemble the Netflix model: x number of titles at a time, no due dates for a flat monthly fee. And then, Libraries, watch out!
Libraries and publishers must get together to offer an alternative to the Amazon juggernaut, or they are both in trouble.
The End of Libraries
I have a Kindle E Reader but it is not compatible with our local libraries. Would I be able to download ebooks from a U.S. library to my Kindle reader? Thanks.