Amazon Allows Kindle Owners to Share Books

In the last couple weeks, Amazon made good on two announcements made some months ago. One is you can now share Kindle titles with other Kindle owners.

The lending feature has been on the want list of Kindle owners for some time. If you are a Kindle customer you can now be able to share titles you have purchased with any other Kindle user - including those using the free Kindle apps.

While a title is on loan the lender has no access to it and this seems fair, but you can only loan a title once and only for 14 days - which seems far too short. There are also other restrictions,  lending can only be initiated by customers in the U.S and recipients in some countries won't be allowed access to some titles.  Currently, sharing can only be administered via the Amazon website.

In addition, the facility is controlled by the publisher who can opt to enable or disable sharing. As you can guess most publishers see no advantage in letting users share a book with another user and so lose a potential sale. As a result you have to look quite hard to find a Kindle book that you can use to even just test the facility!

Here's hoping more and more books become sharing enabled. I can understand if newly released titles won't be able to be shared, but after a period of one year, most books should be able to be shared.