On Amazon Kindle new lending library: The good, the bad and the ugly

Yesterday Amazon opened the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, allowing Amazon Prime members to rent one digital book per month for free. Right now, this library includes 5,000 titles, including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers.

Coming from Amazon, this is a big step in the ebook space and we thought it's worth looking into three consequences of it: the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good: If you are a Kindle holder and also Amazon Prime member you just got yourself a free ebook every month. This is also good news to ebook lending fans in general - the market is and will get more competitive and readers will be the ones that will profit from it eventually. For example, right now ebook lending services such as eBookFling and BookLending, as well as libraries, let you rent ebooks only up to 14 days. Now that Amazon is offering you to rent a book for one month, there's a good chance other players in the market will eventually try to offer a similar offer.

The bad: Amazon is conquering another piece of the ebook market. It's true that right now it's only a pilot program offered to Prime members, but how much time do you think it will take Amazon to dominate the market? Not too much I guess. So even though the entrance of Amazon to this market will benefit readers (see the good part), it also helps to strengthen the status of Amazon as the most powerful player in the book market. And with Amazon exploring other parts of this market like publishing and self-publishing, it looks like that in couple of years Amazon won't be just a powerful player in the book market, but it will be the book market. This is definitely not a desirable future for this industry.

The  ugly: This move is bad news for brick and mortar bookstores in general and independent bookstores specifically, as it will help to energize the transformation to ebooks  (if this trend needs any help at all) and make more people do their ebook activity, whether its shopping or renting through Amazon. Not to mention that it provides readers that are not Prime members a good reason to consider paying the $79 annual fee and become Prime members. And once they become Prime members, with the free two day shipping, there's also a good chance they will start doing their paper book shopping only on Amazon, enjoying this shipping benefit. Again, not a desirable situation if you're an independent bookstore or even Barnes & Noble.

To read more updates on the ebook lending space check our ebook lending page.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

Guest post: The features that will perfect your eBooks

Today we have a guest article by Dan Harrison who writes about eco-friendly technology for EnviroGadget.com. EnviroGadget features the latest news and reviews about green gadgets, such as solar powered gadgets, eco-friendly camping gadgets, devices that benefit your health, and more!

eBooks have been around for a while now, and eBook reading devices such as the Kindle are just starting to become popular. However, for an ebook reader to be a true replacement for a good old-fashioned book, there are some challenges that we need to overcome. So here are a few ideas on features we need to see from eBook readers to even consider them a fair replacement.

Selling an eBook on again. With a real book, we can exchange, swap or sell them with other people. eBooks are essentially just files and a great deal of work has gone into copy-protection schemes to protect against theft. Surely we want to be able to sell, give away, or exchange our copy if we choose to? However, this issue does imply that we are paying per book and have some ownership over the book.

Renting an ebook I'm personally a fan of public libraries. It's a great way to experience books without owning all of them. Wouldn't it be great to go to a library website and rent a book for a week or two? Ideally this would be free, but if there's money to be made, publishers would probably want a subscription service. Perhaps in the same way Spotify exists for music.

Colour and animations Sure, we're getting closer to being a fully-fledged computer now, but having moving diagrams and colour images in an eBook reader would really improve the experience. I'm thinking more of childrens' books and text books here, but images can really help with explaining something. I believe that most eBook readers at the moment are just black and white.

Writing on some of the pages. For some books, it makes sense to annotate the pages, particularly if you're studying. There are all kinds of things you could do with this feature, such as exporting the notes on to your computer.

Bookmarking pages or portions of text. When I find a great page or quote in a book, I want to save the quote, but I usually end up losing the bit of paper with the details on it. So a useful feature would be to save a portion of text or to bookmark pages with some kind of note. You can then of course export this information to your computer. If you're writing a research paper, being able to save quotations and extract the correct details for references sections would be a huge time saver.

Reading a book using a Text-To-Speech engine If you're too tired to read a book, or there's little light, it would be great if the book could read itself to you. You could adjust the voice, pitch and speed to make it as comfortable as possible to listen to. That said, this feature is just desirable, rather than being essential!

So there are my thoughts on important features ebook readers need to have to match or exceed the usefulness of a book. What would you like to see as a feature for an ebook reader?