Wednesday’s announcement by Amazon that they will finally allow library lending for the Kindle has caused quite a stir on many of the various ereader discussion boards.
Reactions to the news was both mixed and interesting. Here’s a sampling from some of the forums:
The shock and disbelief crowd: “………..runs off to check the thermometer in HELL!!!!!!”
The cynical crowd: “Welcome to the 21st century, Amazon!”
“Great in 20 years when my library finally gets ebooks I will be all set. I wonder if my kindle will last that long….”
“Good. Now maybe those folks will stop complaining about it.”
“You need to sticky post this over in the Q & A forum as well where the “Why can’t I get library books while every other eReader can?!?!” complaint gets posted just about daily.”
The grateful crowd: “I am SUPER excited… THANK YOU AMAZON for listening your consumers!”
“Inability to check out library books is the ONLY thing I dislike about my Kindle.”
“This is awesome news! Guess I will finally have to get a library card again.”
“Now my kindle will be perfect!”
“The now I’ll buy a Kindle” crowd: Now I will buy a Kindle.”
“I’ve been waiting for Amazon to do this before I’d buy a kindle. Guess I’ll probably be getting one now!”
The too late crowd: “Oh, finally!!! If only I had known two months ago before I bought a Nook so I could borrow library books!”
The “I was going to buy a ____ so I could read library books” crowd: Fill in the blank with Nook, Sony, Kobo, etc.
The wanting more and can’t make ’em happy crowds:
“Now if there was only a color version of the Kindle…”
“This is terrific!! Thank you so much 🙂 Please let there be text-to-speech on the library books too, please!”
“Great news. Hopefully the ability to lend your own books to friends more than once will follow.”
“Unfortunately this won’t help the fact that my library has a really poor collection of ebooks and that many major publishers won’t release their ebooks for libraries or severely limit them. But it is definitely a step forward.”
The altruistic crowd:
“Fantastic! Hey Mr. Bezos, one more idea from your customers: when I buy a book from you, after I’m done reading it can you work with Overdrive to figure out a way I can relinquish the e-book and donate it to a library of my choice? Library budgets are tight, and that would be a great way for you, and your customers, to help libraries keep up with technology.”
Concerned for other readers and the libraries crowd:
“Definitely not good news for the other readers – their one big advantage was library books.”
“I do hope it won’t add too much to library expenses. And it will take awhile before many libraries offer this. As it its my local library is not set up for lending to e-readers (I do know about other lending libraries). But I foresee Kindle getting the lion share of business (in the USA) once it happens. I know more people with Kindles than other e-readers.”
Librarians’ reactions to the news show more concern than excitement, as this article from the LibraryJournal.com website shows. You can follow the ongoing discussion on Twitter under the hashtag #AZOD.
So, what about you? How do you feel about the news?
This blog entry composed while listening to The 99 Darkest Pieces Of Classical Music.
The eBook Evangelist 