Amazon now allows book lending for Kindle e-books. You can lend participating titles to anyone for 14 days.
This is a feature that the Nook came with, and that many people had noted as a key differentiator. My mom and brother and I each have Kindles, and I think this lending ability could be quite handy!
Man, Facebook loved this news; y’all are tough. 
It is a lame feature on Nook and Amazon is merely copying a lame feature on Kindle to remove it from the table as a point of comparison.
I’m more than happy to share as possible with people (and have already distributed to my friends what I have that can be shared). But out of 127 books on my Kindle only 14 are available for loan and of those only 8 are actually general interest actually published in paper books (the rest are things that only cost $0.99 in the first place).
Hopefully publishers will change their position and allow for more of it, but until then it is lame.
I instantly took to the e-reader model once I got the first Kindle, and I’ve had all three Kindle models so far, so obviously the sharing aspect was never a drawback for me. But I’d always thought it was more generous in the nook model, since it was one of those comparison points that seemed to be stressed. Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if the availability of sharing is just as limited for the nook as it is for the Kindle? Since it’s apparently the publishers who decide, that would seem to be the case, but if so, it hardly seems worth a mention as a comparison point with so few books actually being made available.
So far as I know the feature is the same for the Nook. 14 days, any individual book can be lent by the buyer just once ever, and it isn’t available to the buyer during the loan. Feature is opted into by the book’s publisher.
I don’t know if Nook has more publishers opted in or if it is the same for both.
My Sony Reader lets me share books with up to 5 Sony Readers authorized to my PC (I have never taken advantage of the feature).
Hmm. I guess it was just one feature that Nook had and Kindle didn’t, so they played it up for all it was worth. Although maybe it matters more for library usage.
Yeah, the Kindle can do this too; Amazon has apps for the iPhone/iPad as well as your computer, and you can sync your progress and access any book in your own account on all your devices (including another Kindle, if you happen to have more than one) with a limit of 6, I think. Sharing, however, lets you actually lend the book to a different user entirely for 14 days.
I’m more interested in the hope that this means libraries will now, perhaps, have books for the Kindle.
That’s sure big of Amazon. Considering real books have bent lent and passed around for centuries.
For me, the convenience of digital books isn’t worth the lifetime license enslavement. I’ll stick with my dogeared paper books I buy used.
My mom was looking at Kindles until I gave her the truth about those things.
I agree this new Amazon policy is good news for people like Kindles.
Er. Ace? I got about sixty books on my Kindle. Only two of them are from Amazon. They’re all legal.
The delay in this sharing thing is the difference between electronic and physical. You can lend me one dogeared paperback. But you won’t have it, and you won’t be able to lend it to other people. Before Amazon could convince the publishers to let you lend your electronic paperback out, they had to be sure you wouldn’t lend fifty copies of the same book out.
Not that I can’t shred the DRM on it anyhow. And I wouldn’t have reccomended the kindle for people if I didn’t know it was possible.
The fact that you can only lend a book once makes me less than excited about this feature. I understand that they have to limit it, but something like five times would be a lot better.
The only advantage the Kindle has over the Nook in this regard is that you don’t need to have an actual Kindle to “borrow” a book from someone: you only need to have the Kindle app, which is free and available on most platforms. Unless there is a similar Nook app that I’m not aware of, in which case it’s exactly the same and just one less differentiator that the Nook can claim. 
There is indeed a nook app, available for iPhone, iPad, Android, and PC. It’s available at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/free-nook-apps/379002321/
Looks like Amazon just decided to eliminate this feature difference between their Kindle and the nook. Still, the limitations from publishers (on both platforms) really hamper the whole lending concept in my opinion. I’m happy with my nook, but the lending was never really a big draw for me personally anyway.