“Amazon to enable peer-to-peer lending & borrowing of Kindle books”

As a consumer, I’ve usually been at the forefront of the digital revolution that has taken over the world in the past 2 decades or so – an early-adopter of technologies, if you may. When it comes to Amazon, this means that all my book purchases have been on Kindle since a while now, and my pre-Kindle bookshelf has stayed where it was a decade ago.

As much as I’m a digital native when it comes to books, there is one shortcoming that digital books have compared to physical books, and surprisingly, the only one holding us back is Amazon.

There is no way in the current digital book world for user to lend books to someone else – someone call still come over and borrow one of my physical books, but we all know how that usually goes. Unless someone is diligent about keeping a track on who has borrowed which books (and many people aren’t), the borrowed book usually disappears forever due to a lack of initiative / follow-up on either side.

The idea is for Amazon to enable peer-to-peer lending & borrowing of Kindle ebooks – something which technology can actually solve for in a great way.

Needless to say, lending will mean that once the book has been lended, only the borrower can access the book, and the lender cannot. This not only replicates the real-world experience of lending a physical book, but also arrests the risk of creating multiple copies of the same book, which would eat into the revenues of Amazon.

Not only can lenders lend their Kindle ebooks, but they can also decide if they want to lend for a fixed time period (e.g. your book is back in your library after 2 weeks) or open-ended (e.g. your book remains with the borrower till the time they don’t send it back or you don’t pull it back). Not only this, Amazon can also show you all the books you’ve lent, how many are with others, and how long has it been since you lent them.

I do understand that borrowing books from friends doesn’t cost any money, and hence, it might be tough for Amazon to make borrowers or lenders cough up any revenue to use this feature, but still, as far as features go, it’s a killer feature that is long overdue, if only from a user experience point-of-view.

Talking about revenue, the long game for Amazon could be to enable borrowers without Amazon accounts or Kindle e-readers to access books, and hence, nudge them towards becoming an Amazon/Kindle user in the medium-to-long term.

P.S. I do know that Amazon rents Kindle books for school/college students in the US, and the users pay to borrow their course material for a year. This lets students use the books they need for the year they are in, without needing to buy the entire book for its lifetime. That said, this idea I’m writing about is different – it’s about opening up the lending feature in a P2P form between any two people, and launch it across the world.