Lendle - share Kindle books

How to share your Kindle books with the others

by Sarah Watts

Using digital e-book services like Kindle are a great way to help the environment but a big drag is, unlike your conventional paper books you cannot share your Kindle books with your friends, relatives and colleagues. It was always so charming to share and lend your books.

When you purchase your Kindle books from Amazon they get sort of attached to your account and you cannot jointly own the books with the others just the way people can take home books from you or you can take home books from them. So how do you share and lend your Kindle books?

One way is to add devices to your Amazon account. You don’t necessarily need the Kindle e-book reading device in order to access your Kindle books and share them. Even if you have a device running iOS, Android or any other contemporary smart device operating system you can install the Kindle software and access all your Kindle books from there. This can also help the others who have devices that can run the Kindle application.

From wherever you can log into your Amazon/Kindle account you can access your books. So all the other person needs is your Amazon account e-mail ID and password. The moment that other person logs into your account from his or her devise he or she can access all your books. This is not a very secure way of sharing your Kindle books and lending it to others because it involves giving your password and the same password can be used to purchase items from your Amazon account especially when you have instructed Amazon to save your credit card information.

The other way you can share and lend your Kindle books is by using Lendle. This service lets you lend your Kindle books to others and share them with your colleagues and friends. A good thing about using Lendle for lending and sharing your Kindle books is you don’t need to share your Amazon password and you can share and lend Kindle books to even strangers. Both the one having the book and the one wanting to read it need to have a Lendle account. It is kind of Kindle-based social networking. You can make many good friends by lending your Kindle books to each other.

Once you have signed up or signed in you can search through their database and find books that you own. Then add all the books that you would like to share to your Lendle account. Afterwards you can yourself send a lend notification to another person or he or she can request a book lend from you.

There are some restrictions though: Right now there seem to be just 6739 (as on March 28, 2011) books in the Lendle database that can be shared. Another restriction is you can share a particular Kindle book only for 2 weeks and after that the book is unavailable to the person to whom you have lent your book. Nonetheless, it is a good way of sharing your Kindle books without sharing your Amazon password. You can also request other Lendle members to share their books with you in case you want to read a Kindle book without purchasing it.

How to share your Kindle books with the others