The Kindle Book Loan Thread
 

I just purchased a Kindle and it should be here by Sunday. I'm eager to try out the new Kindle book loan feature, whereby you can loan any book you've purchased to another Kindle owner for a single two week period. I thought perhaps the other Kindle owners here might care to loan books out to fellow FOFCers. I should add that each purchased book can only be loaned out once so it's possible there won't be enough interest to justify this thread anyway. Oh well, let's give it a shot.

This is a very good idea. I only know one person that I speak with on a regular basis with a Kindle so this might be nice.

Unfortunately I don't believe the few books I have on my Kindle are eligible?

Amazon.com: Never Let Me Go eBook: Kazuo Ishiguro: Kindle Store
Amazon.com: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: A Novel eBook: Mark Haddon: Kindle Store
Amazon.com: The Pillars of the Earth eBook: Ken Follett: Kindle Store

I have:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Under the Dome by Stephen King
The Shack by William P. Young
Serial by Jack Kilborn and Blake Crouch
The Confession: A Novel by John Grisham
Pariah by Bob Fingerman
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max
The Strain by Chuck Hogan and Guillermo Del Toro
Trapped by Jack Kilborn and J.A. Konrath
Afraid by Jack Kilborn
The Rising by Brian Keene
The Passage: A Novel by Justin Cronin

As you can tell, my tastes run to the horror. I did not finish Under the Dome or The Shack. I quit about halfway through. I have not read The Rising or The Confession (although my wife read The Confession). I'd recommend the Jack Kilborn books for a slasher/horror fan. The Passage was okay (1st in a trilogy).

Under the Dome had a solid first half but fell apart near the end. King trademark, I know.

I believe most Kindle books are eligible but I think it depends on the publisher. I don't know if you can check if a book can be loaned from the Amazon page. Can anyone confirm?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/custom...deId=200549320

According to that it should be in the product details.

Oh, ok, so not all books are eligible. Well we should still be able to make use of the lending feature when it is available.

This one pissed me off, too. Read 1,000+ good pages and then use a cheapie ending (that had no foreshadowing whatsoever). May as well have just used the "it was all just a dream" ending.

Definitely. I did a little light reading on it and like most things, its up to the publisher. I have seen comments that in just a few days that amount of books available to lend has risen quite a bit. It's just a matter of time. My three books are probably just bad luck.

Only a few on my Kindle are loanable apparently (you can see it from "Manage My Kindle" page).

These are mine:

A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren
Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others by Scot McKnight

Two Christian books detailing a different way of faith and that's it. And I got a lot more books on my Kindle, but none are loanable.

Anyone who wants to be loaned one of these drop me a PM with your email.

Slightly OT:

In case you guys aren't aware of it, manybooks.net has a bunch (thousands) of free e-books formatted for the Kindle. Matt over there does a great job of aggregating books that are both public domain and released under Creative Commons licenses. (Good enough that I'm frequently sending e-mails to Amazon to block "publishers" who have swiped books I've released for free to sell as Kindle editions on Amazon. ;) )

Anyway, it's a great free resource.

I just got a Kindle for Christmas. I only have one book so far that I've finished and is eligible for loan.

Discord's Apple by Carrie Vaughn

I have a lot of books on Kindle, so it will take me some time to go through the books. So I'll list them as I can.

For now, I have these available:

Dracula, Original Unabridged version (Bram Stoker)
The World Series: A Complete History (Douglas Mallon)
One Beautiful Season (Kyle Whelliston) (a book on mid major college basketball written during the 2009-2010 season) (I'm still reading it, but will
lend as soon as I'm finished if someone interested).
Football Coaching Bible
Boardwalk Empire

Stupid question, but when it says "can be loaned once for a period of 14 days," does that mean it can only be lent out once--or once every 14 day period?

Lent out once every 14 day period.

I might not understand the question, but I was under the impression that a book could only be loaned out once, period.

Hmmm... apparently I was incorrect... reading the Kindle discussions on Amazon, it can only be lent once.

Yes I believe each book may only be loaned out once, period.

I didn't know that you could only lend out certain books. I didn't check to see which books I can lend out.

That's what I would've guessed, since the same restriction is in place on nook.

If Amazon had freer restrictions there, they'd be trumpeting it to the heavens, I'd have to think.

I bought a Kindle for my wife and she has only downloaded one book from the Amazon store and that's about all she knows, so my question is - how do you download books from this site (or any other site, for that matter)? I see how to download a book from there, but how does it get transferred to the Kindle? Is there a USB thing, or wirelessly somehow? I've never even touched the damn thing and don't know the first thing about how it works, other than the book she bought from Amazon "appeared" on the Kindle after she bought it online.

Good question. I don't own a Kindle, but I'll shoot an e-mail to the site owner and see if he has any insight into how it would work. I'll send you a PM when I get the answer.

hxxp://manybooks.net/help/devices/kindle.php


The instructions. I love using the browser to do it. I can go to gamefaqs and d/l a strategy document and get it to my kindle almost instantly.

Thanks!

Books that you buy on Amazon.com are transferred wirelessly to your Kindle or the Kindle app for the iPhone, Mac, PC (or whatever device you're using) via Amazon's own Whispersync service.

Check out the new Homepage – Lendle: Kindleâ„¢ Book Sharing service if you're looking to borrow and loan Kindle books. It's free but requires that you give up your email address in order to borrow and loan books.

* not sure why the link looks weird but it's working *

Sorry if this is mentioned somewhere else ...

I bought a Kindle for my wife a couple months ago, since she travels a lot. Are the prices of e-books really the same as the hardcopy? She went to buy e-books for some of the hardcopy books she was reading, and they were both the same price. I thought that was odd, and randomly went through my book collection. Every single book had the same price e-book vs hardcopy. I thought that was odd since I figured an e-book would be cheaper. Or did I just get incredibly bad luck in the books I chose to look up (or did I go to the wrong place??? .... kindle e-books on Amazon.com).

Over the past year, Publishers have pushed back hard against Amazon's $9.99 price policy. They even started holding back books until a month or two after release. So Amazon has relented, and the prices are creeping higher & higher. You will even notice that Amazon adds a little disclaimer that "price set by publisher". I've been upset with this trend. I fall into the electronic distribution is cheaper than actual paper, but alas... it appears to be a losing argument. And as reading is one of my top hobbies, I've started buying a few more $11.99, $12.99 kindle books.

I've actually been buying more and more physical copies. Fuck em. I love my kindle but I'm not paying the same price for a digital copy. I didn't buy the kindle to lessen the storage of physical copies so I have no problem buying paperback books.

Can you just find a PDF of some books and convert it?

It's what I have done...it's not a great conversion, but it does the job...

Quick kindle question - I noticed the Kindle now has a browser on it. I don't expect to be able to do anything crazy with, but does it work reasonably well enough to read articles on CNN or ESPN?

I've used the browser and it really isn't bad. It's not great, but it doesn't totally suck. We have the original Kindle, so it's not in color. I've logged into Facebook and navigated around it, so I'm thinking cnn.com shouldn't be too difficult.

Long shot, but does anyone have "The Extra 2%" by Jonah Keri available for loan? Been itching to read it but I tend to be a bit frugal when it comes to ebooks and the $14 on amazon is a bit too high for me.