A lot of library and ebook pundits (all five of us?) have been talking about it, but Amazon finally launched its Kindle Owner’s Lending Library. Well, really it’s more of the “Amazon Prime members ($79/year) who have an actual physical Kindle device and not just the iPhone app library,” which was what made this such an obvious move. Amazon has been working to find more ways to add value to their Prime program such as the inclusion of streaming movies and TV shows. The Kindle Fire page spends much more time talking about the streaming media from Prime than it does the books. The tagline says it all: “Web, movies, apps, games, reading, and more”—as if books were almost relegated to the “and more” category.
While this is interesting to look at, the real question, of course, is what impact will this have on our libraries?
Joe Brockmeier from ReadWriteWeb warns everyone not to get too excited. “Users get access to one book a month with no due dates. So if you have dreams of burning your library card and tapping the Kindle library for all your reading needs, guess again.” And don’t think that the lack of a due date will let you build a free collection over the upcoming months. With each new book borrowed, the previous book gets automatically removed.
Coverage from the Wall Street Journal is even more revealing. “None of the six largest publishers in the U.S. is participating. Several senior publishing executives said recently they were concerned that a digital-lending program of the sort contemplated by Amazon would harm future sales of their older titles or damage ties to other book retailers,” the newspaper reported November 3. It seems that Amazon is faring little better than we are in working to secure lending rights from the big six publishers. Though I am not always the biggest fan of OverDrive, this clearly shows that the work Steve Potash and OverDrive put in to secure the limited lending rights that the library vendor has are not to be dismissed lightly.
So, as an electronic services librarian from Seattle notes in the WSJ coverage, this isn’t the end of libraries as we know them. Scare number 52,348,272 about the imminent demise of our profession due to e-content averted! Though this is a nice boon for Amazon Prime members who also own a Kindle reader, there are many more people using libraries who have neither. Furthermore, the inability of Amazon to secure the elusive lending rights from the big six shows that ebooks have a ways to go before they fully replace print.
So will this impact libraries? Probably not too much in its current form. But there is a lot we can learn from this. The Kindle Lending Library shows the potential for a new ebook model that we might want to talk to publishers about, and it certainly shows the power of talking with smaller publishers who are ready, willing, and able to deal with us. Coming from the school library world, every time I read about the big six I am grateful for the many independent publishers who work closely with K–12 libraries to find mutually beneficial models.