Should Amazon Offer e-book Lending On Kindle?

Nook is not even shipping yet, but it has generated quite a buzz around the Internet. It’s one of few devices that can hold its own against Amazon Kindle on many factors. In fact, the device has some decent advantages over the Kindle. It takes advantage of Android platform, has a color LCD for navigation, and provides support for PDF and ePub. One features stands above the rest however. The fact that you can lend your e-books to others for 14 days. Something that has not been possible on e-book readers till now.

Nook’s LendMe does remind of a similar feature that Microsoft implemented on Zune. So the concept is nothing new. It’s a good step forward towards making e-books and e-readers mainstream. In case you haven’t noticed (I am sure you have), you can’t lend your books on Kindle nor can you sell them to others. That is a glaring hole in Amazon’s Kindle strategy, and the company hasn’t addressed that just yet. It’s not known how enabling lending on e-readers will affect publishers. Publishers are already complaining about not making enough money with e-books. How would they feel if people start lending more and stop buying more copies?

Will you actually buy an e-book that you borrowed and read within the 14-day lending period? Besides, can Amazon keep people from cracking its proprietary format? Amazon should think about changing the way people buy and consume e-books. If it expects people to treat e-books more seriously, it needs to make it possible for people to share content with each other and even sell their e-books. Lending can be a nice feature to add to Kindle, but it is going to be a can of worms. In fact, we still don’t know the details of this program. B&N indicates that there could be limits to this program. Considering how things worked out on Zune, it’s worth waiting to see how things will work out for Nook.

The e-book economy has a long way to go before e-books become as popular as their paper counterparts. I still believe that having subscription plans for e-books (similar to Real Network’s rhapsody) is the way to go. Amazon and other e-book stores need to find the right balance between keeping the publishers happy and providing more value to e-book owners. LendMe is a good start but will it be enough? Will it even be successful? We will have to wait and see.