Lending a Kindle Book to a family or friend has been pretty simple with the Kindle Lending Library, launched in 2011. However, the program was discontinued on January 4th, 2021. This 10-year-old program was popular in the early years of the Kindle but waned when Prime Reading was launched in 2016. What are the other ways you can share Kindle books in 2024?
The only way to share Kindle e-books in 2024 is to set up a Family Library using a feature called Amazon Household. The feature can only be shared with the same family: two adults and four kids. When you create your Amazon Household, you can choose which Amazon content you want to share. If you left the e-books option checked, your library will automatically appear on your other family members’ Kindles. The Kindle Household e-books in the library can also be shared with the Kindle app for Android or iOS.
Amazon has a full step-by-step tutorial that walks you through setting up the Household system and everything you have to do so select individual book titles or the entire library.
However, sharing books with friends or strangers is impossible since Amazon discontinued all of the old programs that allowed this. Even their competitors, such as the Barnes and Noble Nook or Rakuten Kobo, do not have a lending system.
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.
