Bookworms who own Amazon.com Inc.’s popular Kindle electronic reader will finally be able to borrow digital books from public libraries.
Amazon said Wednesday that it will launch the public-library feature — which gives the Kindle the same library-borrowing abilities as competing e-reading devices such as Barnes & Noble Inc.’s Nook and Sony Corp.’s Reader — later this year. “We think customers are going to love this new library feature,” said a spokeswoman for the Seattle-based retailer.
The move is likely to have repercussions for public libraries and the digital-reading market, since Amazon dominates the e-book industry. There are an estimated 7.5 million Kindles in the U.S., which gives Amazon a two-thirds share of the $1 billion digital-book market, said Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey.
There likely will be little immediate impact on Amazon’s business since no money changes hands in borrowing digital books. But analysts said the new feature could help adoption of the Kindle in the long term, potentially leading to greater Kindle book sales.
Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, which holds the second-biggest share of the e-reader market with its Nook reader, said Amazon’s announcement “is not news for Nook customers who have always had access to library services.”
Many major public libraries, including those in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, offer free digital-book lending. A physical trip to the library isn’t required. Instead, library-card holders can download books from library websites. Each library sets its own digital-book lending policy, but typical lending periods are 14 or 21 days.
Libraries need to purchase digital copies of books in order to lend them out. The e-books are then loaned out as if they were physical books. Only one person can check out each digital copy at a time.
Amazon’s move delighted librarians such as Graham Tedesco-Blair of the Wichita Falls, Texas, public library. He said about 500 people regularly borrowed from the library’s collection of 2,600 digital books, but mostly on the Nook and other devices. “It’s always been kind of disappointing to say, ‘Well, it’ll work on everything but the Kindle,’ ” he said.
To provide library access, Amazon is working with OverDrive Inc., a company majority-owned by private-equity firm Insight Venture Partners that enables library clients to borrow digital works.
OverDrive has worked with major libraries and supports library lending for the Nook, Sony Reader, and Kobo Inc.’s Kobo reader. Amazon said Kindle users will have access to OverDrive’s catalog of more than 300,000 e-books and audio books.
The question of library lending has been thorny for publishers. A key issue is that unlike physical books, digital copies don’t wear out, which means publishers and authors don’t benefit from a popular title that has to be reordered because of extended use. Two of the country’s largest publishers, CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster Inc., and Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, don’t currently sell their digital works to libraries.
“We value libraries for their work of encouraging literacy and the habit of reading, but we haven’t yet found a business model we’re comfortable with,” said Adam Rothberg, a Simon & Schuster spokesman.
HarperCollins Publishers Inc., a unit of News Corp., recently changed its terms for library sales, limiting each title to 26 checkouts. A library then needs to repurchase the book in order to continue lending it. The move was widely criticized by the library community. A spokeswoman for HarperCollins declined to comment. News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.
Goddess says “In Her opinion, HarperCollins are greedy whore publishers.”