Amazon has scored a major deal with J.K. Rowling that probably cost a truckload of Galleons to add all seven Harry Potter ebooks to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library starting on June 19th.
Basically what that means is any Kindle owner with an Amazon Prime membership will be able to download and read any Harry Potter ebook for free, up to one per month.
That’s how the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library works: you can barrow one ebook per calendar month for free. After the month is over you can return the book to get another for free or keep reading the one you have. There are no expiration dates like with library ebooks and no waiting lists either.
Here’s an earlier post for a complete rundown on the ins and outs of Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. It has grown considerably since Amazon first launched it back in November 2011. At that time there were only 5,000 titles to choose from; now there are almost 150,000 prime ebooks.
So if you have a Kindle and Amazon Prime this is a pretty sweet deal for Harry Potter fans. Borrowing the series from local libraries can take years with the long waiting lists, and buying the series from Pottermore costs $57.54 for the boxed set, more when purchased individually.
For those wondering what Amazon Prime is, it is a membership that Amazon offers to U.S. customers for $79 a year. Prime members get free two-day shipping on items sold from Amazon.com. Plus they get unlimited access to Amazon’s Netflix-like streaming video service, and of course the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.
Nathan, I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the public library e-book loaning program as taking “years” to have a book come up for borrowing. I’m a patron of Los Angeles Public Library and their program is very rhobust and the wait times, even for the most popular titles (200+ people in queue) can move quite quickly.
The library is able to dynamically adjust the number of copies available for loan on the more popular titles to decrease wait times. Also, in many cases people either ignore their title available email and/or don’t have a check out slot available. When your title becomes available you have 96 hours to check it out or the title is passed to the next person in queue.
My personal experience is the waiting time for the most popular titles runs around 2 to 3 months at the most and you can be queued up for a maximum of 10 titles at one time. Not immediate gratification, like Amazon Prime, mind you, but not the other extreme “years of waiting” either.
You’re lucky you live in the vicinity of such a large library that supports ebooks and accommodates for a large user base. A lot of people don’t have that luxury. I guarantee it would take well over a year to get all seven Harry Potter ebooks from my library. And it is one of the largest counties in the mid-west, but the digital format doesn’t get nearly as much funding as it should.
Same where I live. Seems like the people in power forget us rural folks 🙁
Maybe they think we can’t read or it ain’t worth their time because they can get more bang for their buck getting votes in larger cities….
Nathan and Bob, the Los Angeles Public Library is not awash in funding. We recently passed a special sales tax increase to specifically fund the libraries and allow them to open back up on Mondays.
I’m wondering if the digital side of the Los Angeles library does not have a lot of usage compared to population served as yours does. Maybe e-book usage is higher in rural areas since people may read more (less urban distractions).
I would also think that Overdrive requires Los Angeles to buy more e-book capacity due to it’s size and therefore our usage is below our minimum purchased capacity.
Make any sense?