Newspaper Support Group

I posted about Amazon Singles just two days ago, so normally I’d hold off writing about them again for a little while. But they’ve just announced that people will be able to lend books to one another via their Kindles. This is a beautiful idea. Unfortunately it looks like the book publishers have succeeded in crippling the feature enough to make it only nominally useful. Lending has always been the Killer Application for paper books. You can read them, dog ear the corners, write notes, and pass them along to a friend after you had finished. The public library (which has become a ubiquitous feature in American towns) is predicated on the idea that books and knowledge should be a community resource. Now you can share your own private library with a single friend once on the Kindle for 14 days. While the book has been assigned to another, you can’t read it. You know, it’s really too bad that the book publishers fought for strange arbitrary restrictions. It’s such a good idea and such a mediocre beginning. We’ll have to hope (much like the iTunes music store) that Amazon can eventually negotiate a better deal down the line. I’m almost out of ideas why not to purchase a Kindle. If they can improve the sharing functionality, they’ve got a huge viral hit on their hands. I’m still not sure what you do after 14 days when you’re half way through Anna Karenina. But between Kindle Singles and the ability to easily lend books to friends and family, they’ve got an incrementally better product you almost can’t beat for the price.

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