Prime members can now borrow certain e-books for free (one a month).
(Credit:
Amazon)
There's now an easy way to see the full list of free e-book titles available to Kindle owners with Amazon Prime.
In case you missed it, Amazon recently launched the
Kindle Owners' Lending Library, which allows Amazon Prime members to check out up to one e-book a month for free with no due date.
The only problem is that it wasn't so easy to find all the more than
5,000 titles in the Kindle Store that qualify for free borrowing.
However, as one might expect, a somewhat helpful link has cropped up in
the blogosphere.
Click on
this link to get to the list.
The shortcut comes courtesy of
Publishers Marketplace Automat, which I found via a
Pubisher's Lunch tweet yesterday.
Curiously, the Publishers Marketplace Automat link misstates the
number of titles--it says it "[l]ets You Browse 2,700 Prime Lending
Titles Right On Their Site," when the actual number is currently showing
as 5,377. Their Amazon link also directs you to the list of print books
that are eligible for free Prime shipment--you need to click on the
Kindle-specific link that I supplied above.
The default sort on the list is by popularity, but you can use the genre list on the left-hand side to filter accordingly.
It's important to remember that Prime-eligible loaners can only be
read on Kindle hardware devices--you can't read them with Kindle apps on
devices such as the
iPad or
Android smartphones and
tablets,
nor can you read them on your computer in the browser-based Kindle
Cloud Reader. Likewise, you can't "send" loaners to Kindle devices from
your Web browser, as you can with e-book purchases; you'll have to look
up the book on the Kindle itself to download it.
That said, the
link lets you browse Prime-eligible titles, so you can be sure that you
won't be buying (or wish-listing) a title that you can otherwise read
for free.
In other Kindle Owners' Lending Library news, not everybody is happy
about Amazon's latest move. As expected, there's been some chatter from
wary publishers as well as agents and authors wondering how authors will
be properly compensated.
The compensation issue is full of questions because it's currently
unclear how Amazon is stocking the titles in its Lending Library.
Paid Content reports
that Amazon is paying a lump sum to publishers that agreed to be part
of the new program. But in other cases--according to Publishers
Marketplace (
registration required for full article)--Amazon
isn't asking for consent and is simply paying the wholesale rate for
the "free" book (about 50 percent off the list price) and taking the
loss. (CNET hasn't independently verified any of the publishers'
deals--or lack thereof--with Amazon Prime.) As this is new territory for
publishers, it's unclear how all this plays out with authors'
contracts.
In the meantime, though, it makes that $79 that many of us spend on Amazon Prime membership a better and better deal.