Kindle to get lending feature just like Nook – sometime in 2010

Your Kindle 3 and your other Kindles will soon get a Nook LendMe type feature that lets you lend books once. The key details -

1. Each book can be lent only once.  
2. The loan can be for a maximum of 14 days.
3. You can’t read your book while you’ve lent it.
4. Publishers determine if books are lendable.
5. Feature arrives sometime in 2010.

An official announcement at the kindle forum about the new Kindle Lending feature -

Second, later this year, we will be introducing lending for Kindle, a new feature that lets you loan your Kindle books to other Kindle device or Kindle app users. Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period. Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable – this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.

It’s a rather limited feature – Guess Amazon has grown tired of people thinking Nook allows ‘ebook lending’ when it’s a severely limited and rather unhelpful feature. Their solution – introduce an equally limited and equally pointless lending feature.

Thanks to CrunchGear for catching the news.

Kindle newspapers and magazines available on Kindle Apps

The other news in the announcement is that Kindle for Android, Kindle for iPhone, and other Kindle apps will in the near future become capable of delivering newspapers and magazines.

Here’s what Amazon has to say -

First, we are making Kindle newspapers and magazines readable on our free Kindle apps, so you can always read Kindle periodicals even if you don’t have your Kindle with you or don’t yet own a Kindle. In the coming weeks, many newspapers and magazines will be available on our Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, and then we’ll be adding this functionality to Kindle for Android and our other apps down the road.

It clearly seems that Amazon is selling more books via Kindle for iPad and Kindle for iPhone than via Kindle for Android. There’s no other reason why it would start magazine delivery on the iWhatever apps and leave out Android (at least initially).

In the thread people are pointing out that the lack of support for library books is a bigger issue than the two listed above and that’s a very valid point. There are also comments about the prices of magazine and newspaper subscriptions beginning to veer into Cuckoo-Land and that’s another valid point.