A key factor in the success of the Amazon Kindle reader has undoubtedly been the number of Kindle books available for consumers to choose from. Currently, Kindle owners can choose from over 725,000 Kindle books – and that’s just the paid titles. Amazon also offer 1.8 million out of copyright books which can be downloaded to the Kindle free of charge.
Apart from making huge volumes of reading material available for Kindle owners, Amazon has also gone out of its way to make it easy to read Kindle books without a Kindle reader. This has been done by making a number of Kindle apps which allow Kindle books to be read on a range of different devices freely available.
At the moment, free Kindle apps exist for the Windows PC, the Apple Mac, any device which runs the Android Operating System, the iPhone, the iPad and Blackberry’s smart phone. At first glance, it almost appears as if Amazon is setting up in competition to itself, but the truth of the matter is that each of these apps acts as a retail outlet for Kindle books.
Amazon has just advised that, in the near future, Kindle owners will have the ability to “lend” each other ebooks. The date for this is yet to be confirmed, but it will commence sometime this year.
Kindle owners will have the option of lending Kindle books to their family and friends for a couple of weeks at a time. The “borrower” can read the book using their Kindle – exactly as if they had bought it themselves. The original purchaser will be unable to access the book whilst it is “lent out”. Just like a real book in fact.
Not all books will be able to be lent to friends and family. The final say as to whether or not a particular Kindle book may be lent out rest with the book’s publisher. It will be interesting to discover how different publishing houses react to this.
Amazon has also confirmed that it will extend its free Kindle apps to include newspapers and magazines in addition to Kindle books. First to be activated will be the Apple devices, followed by desktop applications and Android devices.
Over the last couple of years or so, the ebook reader and ebooks have really taken off. Although the ebook market is still developing and is at an early stage, the public already seems to have accepted ebooks. This latest development by Amazon brings ebooks even closer to the functionality of conventional books. Apart from balancing the leg of a wobbly table or pressing flowers, ebooks can now do just about anything that conventional books can. It’s another major step forward for ebooks and ebook readers, and it will help them to become even more widely accepted by the reading public.
Learn more about the Amazon Kindle for yourself and view the wide range of Kindle accessories available to help you personalise your reader.