Just in time for the new year: Kindle book lending.

Well, they said they were working on it, and just before the end of 2010, Amazon delivered their new lending feature.  In many ways, this version of the feature mirrors what Barnes and Noble has done for their ebooks.  The specifics can all be researched here: 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200549320

The jist of it for those that don't want to follow the link is you can loan out books to others, whether Kindle owners, or just users of the various Kindle Apps for a period of 14 days.  However, much like the B&N version, you can loan out each book only once to just one person.  While the book is out on loan, the original user can't access and read the book.  I think that it's quite reasonable to set up the technology to work in this fashion, such that as long as the book is out on loan, you can't read it yourself.  That mimics the way it would work for a real book.  Of course, unlike a real book out on loan, you get it back automatically after 14 days.  Whether your buddy is done reading it or not.   Good for you, of course, but not so good for your friend if you didn't appropriately coordinate the loan. 

I'm disappointed that you can only lend each book once.  I get that the publishers don't want to have people buying a book, then lending it to every friend, and thereby losing all those additional sales.  But often, I'll loan out the first book of a series, and that's all I need to loan out to friends to get them interested in an author.  So some books, I loan a lot, whereas others, even by the same author, I don't loan ever.  Perhaps if there was a way to reset the clock, maybe once every few months, or even once a year would be nice.  It would be a shame to loan out a book my one and only time, only to later learn that the person didn't even get the chance to read or finish the book.  It would also be nice if there was a built in feature that tracked how far along the reader was in the book, and perhaps allowed you to extend the loan for a few extra days, maybe even just once, so that the borrower can finish if they hadn't gotten all the way through the book.  

But this cuts back one of the most common complaints I've heard against ebooks, and it really is about time that Amazon caught up on this feature, because it's something the public wants.  Whether they'll actually use it?  Hard to say.  But it's here, and perhaps over time, the feature will be refined and improved with user feedback.

Like many of the other features, however, this one is controlled by the publisher.  Which means that the publisher has the say on whether they want to allow lending of their books.  Keep that in mind.  The pressure is on Amazon, now that there's a lot of competition.  Let's see if they will keep their pack leader position, or if they will give it up.