Website creates a virtual library to lend Kindle books

By Laura Khalil Published July 18, 2017

KindleLendingClub.com provides a platform to browse, lend and request hundreds of thousands of Kindle ebook titles. When the site connects a book borrower and lender, the borrower can download the title to her Kindle reader, smartphone, iPad or PC within seconds. The service is entirely free for both lenders and borrowers and the book is automatically returned to its owner after 14 days. KindleLendingClub.com is, in effect, a crowdsourced virtual lending library.

Amazon rolled out Kindle’s new book lending feature on December 30, 2010. Kindle owner and KindleLendingClub.com founder Catherine MacDonald heard about Kindle book lending in response created a community on Facebook where people could meet to lend and borrow. The Facebook community immediately caught on like wildfire, attracting hundreds of people, and Catherine realized that this demand for a way to easily borrow and lend ebooks online warranted a custom-developed web application; KindleLendingClub.com was born. In public beta for just over a week, the website is already serving 7,000+ people and it has facilitated 2,500+ book loans.

Recommended Videos

The site is still very much in beta and has a few kinks to work out. The selection is limited, but the site has been live less than a month, and we’d expect to see the selection and variety grow over time as the idea of sharing e-books with strangers kicks off.

The Amazon Kindle lending program only permits an owner to lend a copy of any given ebook once, ever, and only for a maximum of 14 days. Book borrowers who do not want to wait their turn to borrow a popular title, who want to reread or refer back to a book, or who just don’t have time to finish reading the book are likely to buy, she says. “I recently borrowed Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Freedom’ and I just didn’t have time to finish it. Now I’m going to have to purchase my own copy.”

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Laura is a tech reporter for Digital Trends, the editor of Dorkbyte and a science blogger for PBS. She's been named one of…

Entertainment

Joker 2 sets a historic new low for comic book movies

Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix hold microphones in Joker 2.

Joker: Folie à Deux has officially fallen farther than any other comic book movie in at least one noteworthy metric.

The hype surrounding the once highly anticipated sequel to 2019's Joker has been on a steady decline ever since the initial, lukewarm reactions to it started to come following its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in early September. A month later, the film has received largely negative reviews from both critics and casual viewers alike. It is also expected to fall short in its first weekend of its predecessor's $96 million box office opening.

Computing

An all-glass MacBook? Here’s what Apple thinks it would look like

Bladur's Gate 3 being played on the M3 MacBook Air.

Patents and clues pointing to all-glass MacBooks and iMacs have been floating around since 2011, and this week, another patent has appeared on Patently Apple -- a "glass housing" for a MacBook-like device. It has a virtual keyboard and trackpad, and there's even a separate patent for "finger devices" that would decrease the strain of typing on a glass surface.

One of the most interesting things about the glass housing is that it "provides I/O functionality." This means, that instead of inserting a separate trackpad or keyboard keys into the housing for users to interact with, the housing itself would provide a method of input and output. In some areas and contexts, the surface would function simply as housing to protect internal components, and in others, it would display information and react to user input.

Computing

The M4 MacBook Pro is apparently listed for sale on Facebook — but I don’t buy it

An open MacBook Pro on a table.

According to analysts and industry experts like Mark Gurman and Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is expected to announce an M4 refresh of the MacBook Pro possibly this month and most likely before the end of the year. No event announcements have come yet, though Apple has historically held an October Mac event. But now, an online leak discovered by Wccftech claims the new model is up for sale on a private Facebook group. The claim is backed up by alleged images of the retail box, but there's plenty to be suspicious about.

While the images were posted by known leaker ShrimpApplePro, the information was sent to them from an unknown source. There are two posts so far, one with an image of the back of the retail box -- with comments from AppleShrimpPro saying to take it with asome skepticism -- and one showing additional images and claiming it's for sale on Facebook.