Amazon to offer library lending to US Kindle e-readers

Users of the Amazon Kindle e-reader will soon be able to borrow electronic books from American libraries using a system similar to one in the U.K. that ran into problems.

Kindle e-book and app users will be allowed to borrow Kindle books from more than 11,000 libraries in the U.S. under the Kindle Library Lending program, which launches later this year (Amazon.com did not give a precise date).

Roberta A. Stevens, the president of the American Library Association (ALA), told the New York Times that Amazon's move into library lending was "all but inevitable."

"I can't say that I'm surprised," she said. "They were just shutting off a whole part of the marketplace. It's just logical that this would happen."

Amazon is teaming up with distributor Overdrive, which already offers an e-book lending service in the U.K. 

However, the program there encountered problems last month after HarperCollins imposed a limit on the number of times its ebooks could be checked out from a library to 26 per title.

Furious librarians are calling for a boycott of publisher, according to the Guardian, while Phil Bradley, vice president of the U.K.'s Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, blogged: "I simply cannot begin to describe what a stupid, backward-looking and retrograde step I think this is." 

He called the move "a direct attack on a library's users, making it difficult for them to borrow electronic books that they might otherwise be unable to read," adding: "Worse than that, it is going to make libraries think twice about purchasing ebooks in the future if publishers think that they can just change the rules whenever they feel like it."

In the U.S., borrowed books will be available on Amazon's own Kindle reader as well as other devices running the Kindle software, including iPads and Android tablets.

The deal follows similar agreements from the Kindle's rivals, the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble's Nook. However, the Kindle service comes with new features: It allows users to make notes in the margins, using Whispersynch, and also highlight pages; borrowers can even mark the last page read even for those titles lent out once more.

Anyone wanting to borrow a publication must be a member of their local library. Titles are downloaded through the library's website and automatically removed after a set number of days, with a maximum loan time of three weeks.

A recent ALA report revealed research showing that 72 percent of public libraries offer ebooks and 5 percent of American adults owned an ebook reader, the Guardian reports.

The ebooks accounted for only a small percentage of borrowed items from most libraries, according to the ALA, but they were the fastest-growing segment: the Chicago Public Library, it said, doubled its circulation of ebooks from 17,000 in 2009 to more than 36,000 in 2010.