A major factor in the massive success of the Amazon Kindle Reader has definitely been the massive number of Kindle titles on offer for customers to choose from. At this time, Kindle owners can choose from more than 725,000 paid titles. Amazon also has 1.8 million out of copyright books which can be downloaded to the Kindle free of charge.
Apart from making huge volumes of reading material available for Kindle owners, Amazon has certainly gone out of its way to make it easy to read Kindle books without a Kindle reader. This has been achieved by releasing a number of free Kindle apps which permit Kindle books to be read on a range of different devices.
Currently, there are free Kindle apps for the Windows PC, the Apple Mac, any device which runs the Android Operating System, the iPhone, the iPad and the Blackberry smart phone. At first glance, it almost appears as if Amazon is setting up in competition to itself, but the truth of the matter is that each of these apps acts as a retail outlet for Kindle books.
Amazon has announced that Kindle owners will be able to lend each other Kindle books in the near future. Amazon has not confirmed the date for this yet - but it should start before the end of the year.
Users will have the possibility of lending Kindle books that they've enjoyed to their friends and family for a fortnight at a time. The "borrower" can read the book on their Kindle reader - just as if it was one of their own purchases. The original buyer won't be able to access the book for the duration of the loan. Exactly the same as a conventional book in fact.
Some books will be incapable of being lent out. The final decision as to whether or not books may be lent out will rest with the publishers. It will be interesting to see if the publishing houses react differently to this.
Amazon has also confirmed that it will its current free Kindle apps will be extended to include newspapers and magazines as well as Kindle books. Initially, the Apple devices will be activated, followed by Android and desktop applications.
Over the last year or so, the ebook reader and ebook market has really taken off. Although the ebook market is still developing and is in an early stage, the public already seems to have grown accustomed to ebooks. This latest development by Amazon brings ebooks even closer to the functionality of conventional books. You can now do just about everything with an e-book that you can with a conventional book – apart from dog-earing the pages that is. It’s a big step forward for both ebook readers and ebooks readers, and it's one which can only will help them to become ever more widely accepted by the public.
