The IHE Kindle Lending Society

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Can I lend you a Kindle e-book? Do you have any Kindle e-books to share?

I know that there are sites such as booklending.com and lendle.me that allow for loaning and borrowing of Kindle books. But I want to loan my books to the people in our IHE community. I want to read the books that you are reading. And I'm hoping that we can discuss and recommend books to each other using the IHE site and the DISQUS platform.

Below you will find my list of Kindle books that are "lendable." If you send me an e-mail, or better yet add a comment (that includes your e-mail and name), I'll loan you the book. First come first serve. And I'll keep a list, so if more then one person requests a book I'll send it out you once the initial loan is done. Amazon allows books to be lent for 14 days, and you can read about how this work on the Lending Kindle Books page.

If you have books that you want to lend please feel free to put your list in the Comments section. If this gets going, I can aggregate everyone's books once in a while in a new post, so that we can all see in one place what our IHE community has on offer to lend.

This solution seems somewhat inelegant. Wouldn't it be great if IHE and Amazon could partner somehow, offering dynamic syncing of available Kindle lending books in a module accessible from the IHE page? Facilitating the sharing of books from within cohesive online communities such as IHE would seem like a win / win proposition. A win for the partner sites, as book sharing builds community. And a win for Amazon, as people who share books both buy more books and recommend more books. Maybe someday.

My list of sharable books below is also of course limited to what the publishers are willing to allow Amazon to share. A publisher choice to not allow sharing strikes me as unforgivably shortsighted. Why any publisher would choose to cut-off a mechanism to have their books talked about completely mystifies me. The greatest risk for 99.99% of books is not sharing, but invisibility. Books that are shared are books that are discussed, and some people will always choose to buy rather than borrow.

I imagine that the ability to lend an e-book will also become one factor in the decision to buy an e-book. All things being equal, I'll be much more likely to purchase a new e-book if lending is enabled. And I'll buy more e-books if the lending option becomes more ubiquitous, and a better marketplace is built for the sharing of e-books.

My Kindle Lending Library: