Amazon.com announced today that Kindle books can now be borrowed from over 11,000 libraries in the United States.
The move was expected as Amazon announced back in April that they were partnering with OverDrive, an ebook distributor, to provide the service.
The process of checking out a Kindle book from a participating library still looks a bit clunky after browsing The Seattle Public Library’s instruction guide.
Basically, you have to:
1. Go to your library’s site.
2. Click ebooks which takes you to OverDrive’s site for your library.
3. Browse or search for the book you want and click checkout.
4. You will then enter your library card info.
5. Then you are redirected to Amazon where you need to login with your Amazon account.
6. Then you select the device you want the Kindle book sent to and click download.
This is considerably easier than borrowing an ebook for Barnes & Noble’s Nook or Sony’s Reader but it’s still fairly burdensome.
The entry of Amazon’s Kindle books into library lending is huge. We can definitely expect to see more of libraries’ budgets being spent on ebooks now that library users can borrow ebooks from all the major players.