Amazon has announced today that the Kindle Owners Lending Library is hitting the United Kingdom, Germany, and France later this month. With the pending launch of these new lending libraries, the KDP Select fund has been increased by $100,000 to $700,000 in October, with a larger increase anticipated in November.
If you have an Amazon Prime membership, you have the ability to borrow one free ebook a month. There are over 200,000 ebooks currently available and when you borrow a digital version the author actually gets paid for it. Authors can now opt into these new countries when the service goes live, to ensure they are appealing to the new markets.
“The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library was launched less than a year ago in the US and customers are loving it,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content. “It’s also been great for independent authors, who get to reach a whole new audience and make money in a new way, and now they’ll be able to reach even more readers around the world. We’re excited to bring the lending library to the UK, Germany, and France.”
The Lending Library originally launched in the USA in 2011 and no one knew how successful the program would be. Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and many other popular books are available to be borrowed out. You can get ebooks for free directly on your Kindle e-reader or Kindle Fire tablet.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
