Amazon has quietly ended support for the Kindle lending program wherein Kindle users were able to lend e-books to others. Amazon didn’t make any official announcement in this regard, and it is not known either as to what might have prompted the company to make the change. Intriguingly, many of Amazon’s customer service representatives too aren’t aware of the change, as a Book Riot reader who first discovered the change found out but eventually came across a company agent who confirmed the lending option has been discontinued since August 2022.
Previously, e-books marked as lendable could be lent to fellow Kindle users. That effectively meant transferring the particular title to the friend’s Amazon account for a period of time – usually two weeks – during which the title won’t be available to the sender. After the end of two weeks, the title would get returned to the sender’s account automatically. This way, users had the option to share a title with others, something that would have saved them from buying the same themselves. Now the option is gone.
Interestingly it was exactly two years ago – August 2020, to be precise – that Amazon had similarly brought the curtains down to the Kindle Lending Library. It used to be an extremely popular service that allowed users to download one free e-book every month. However, users always had the option to download the same title any time later to continue reading the same.
Amazon, otherwise, has been launching a series of devices of late and refreshed its entire Kindle and Fire tablet range. It even launched the Kindle Scribe which basically is an e-note device and is the first of its kind from Amazon. All of this points to a reorganization of sorts that the company is undergoing drastic change under the leadership of Andy Jassy. I wonder what other Kindle services will axed in a post-Bezos era.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I'll likely make a film sometime in the future.