Amazon Kindle has always had a very unrated feature that lets you lend a Kindle book to a friend. Not all books have lending enabled, but their are millions of titles that have it available. This is useful if you have just read an amazing book and want to share it. You can lend it out for a period of 14 days and it will disappear from your library once the user has accepted the loan. Once the loan period has expired, the book will reappear in your library.
There are a few steps you have to take to get started with the lending process, head to the Amazon website on your computer, make sure you’re logged in, move your mouse over the ‘Account & Lists’ button at the top right of the screen, and click ‘Content & Devices’ from the pop-up menu. Click ‘Books’ and find the book you want to lend. Click the ‘More actions’ button next to the book, and if it’s eligible, click ‘Loan this title.’ You need the users email address for the loan, this is not simply a Gmail or Yahoo address, but the Kindle email address associated with their account.
Most people do not know their Kindle email address, but you can find it by logging into an Amazon account, clicking on Manage your Content and Devices. Click on Devices, and there will be a picture of a Kindle it will say something like “1 Device,” click on that and it will list the user associated with the Kindle with a blue hyperlink, click on that link and it will list the Kindle email address. As an example, it will be something like michael_A4QYjN@kindle.com. Once you know their Kindle email address, you can loan out a book to them, providing lending is enabled.
There are a few steps you have to take to loan out a book to a friend, but once you have this down, it is really easy to share books with your network of friends. There used to be a bunch of lending sites, where users would list the books they had and loan them out, but this sort of thing disappeared a number of years ago. This is because there has been a rise in ebook subscription services, where you can pay a low monthly fee and get access to a copious amount of titles. This includes Kindle Unlimited, Prime Reading, Scribd and a number of others. It is also really easy to borrow books from the public library and send them to the Kindle, this process is automatic in the US from Overdrive enabled libraries. Other markets have to jump trough some hoops.
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.
