Thursday, November 3, 2011

Prime's Kindle Owners' Lending Library - How to borrow a book there


BORROWING OPTION - HOW TO ACCESS IT

I just received a comment on not being able to see "Borrow" option on a Kindle 2 device.  I have to power mine up to test it to see how the Menu options show up there, but this is (slightly modified for the blog) what I answered on what I see on my Kindle 3.

  ' Looking at the bottom of the Amazon.com Prime Kindle Owners Lending Library product page at Amazon.com, there are images at "How to borrow from your Kindle."

  Mine is different in that "Kindle Owners Lending Library" doesn't show up under MENU the way it shows in the image of the Menu there. '
'   It is accessible in several ways but the easiest one is to get to the Kindle Store and click on BROWSE / "See all" ...

  and then when I press Menu, I get the Menu they show, which has "Kindle Owners' Lending Library" option at the bottom.

  When I click on that, each book has "Prime" showing at the right.  For me, non Fiction is the thing but I can't choose that on this "All" (books) page.

  The resulting lending list is too long to browse, at 5000+, so I chose an option in small print at the upper right, "View Subcategories" ...

  Then I clicked "Biographies and Memoirs" and after getting the smaller list (only a couple of hundred), I then clicked on a book that looked interesting.  That showed me a "BUY" button, an "or" and then "Borrow for Free" for 'Prime Members Only'

  Clicking on "Borrow for Free" caused the book to be sent to me.

My Kindle 2 is powering up because I had not touched it for about 2 months and I'll let you know what I see on that but I won't be on my computer for another 8 hours.

Try going to Kindle Community forums and ask there what other Kindle-2 members are finding if what I detailed above doesn't work for you.

Good luck! Contrary to my expectations I see more books there of interest to me than I thought there would be and I don't have to deal with umpteen other people having it 'out' as I do with the public library ones :-)

Like Tom, I love the "no due date" aspect too as the book would be lower priority for me to read than ones I have paid for recently, in most cases - though I see one I want to read right away actually.
Maybe I'll post this as a general followup... '
(...which I just did)

Hope that helps...

Note - The above explains how to Borrow a book, only possible from the Kindle.
  But remember that you can otherwise Browse Prime Lending Kindle books on the Web when you're just looking, by going to http://amzn.to/kprimebooks.  Unfortunately, the Search link includes non-loanable books, which are not borrowable, but you can use the box at the right - above the listing- to choose Low to High pricing after you get your search results and that will help.




Check often: Temporarily-free recently published Kindle books
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.  Liked-books under $1
UK-Only: recently published free books, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

  *Click* to Return to the HOME PAGE.  Or click on the web browser's BACK button


Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle


(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!

7 comments:

  1. I'm wondering if this is for all the 'Loanable' books? Or those and a few extras.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jazz,
    No, afraid not... 5,000 is a small subset of 950,000 books. NO Big6 publishers are joining in (I think it WOULD cause them trouble with B&N and other ebooksellers since prices are 'fixed' and that would be going below other stores' prices), and there are some Big6 who do allow Kindle book lending once-ever from one Kindle owner to another -- but none for this feature.

    ReplyDelete
  3. As usual: not for non-US Kindles.
    On my DX Int'l (B005..., 2.5.8) I can only get Books, Magazines, Newspapers and Singles. No Audible Books, no Blogs, no Lending, no free browsing...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous,
    Sorry to read that. Global rights for digital media are probably hard to program in when gauging where you call Home and where the credit card is etc and what rights are given for/by each publisher in whatever non-USA areas.

    Wish it weren't so. Maybe slowly they can fix this as they have for some books for some countries.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Two notes,

    1. the limiting of borrowing to one book a month seems to make the feature too much trouble to bother with.

    2.The apparent change in the blog so that to read anything but the latest post you need to onerously find the NEXT POST link seems very undesirable.

    Regards, Don

    ReplyDelete
  6. Don,
    I can see your point although Amazon is a store and if they didn't limit it, they'd just be a lending service and there'd be little reason to buy a book, which would make already-unhappy publishers and authors (over low pricing) even more unhappy.

    But the largest point is that no one should join Prime just for the lure of any of the media programs unless they are super enticing, since $80/ yr is still not a small amount.

    Re the blog?
    I don't understand what you may be seeing, and I would like to know.

    All I did was change it so that in any particular specific post free-books post that you go to, you will still see the entire post but if you view the long main blog page of many blogs, you won't have to see the entire free-books entries with long lists of books taking up so much space on the main page.

    I take the RSS feed to doublecheck it and I am seeing 25+ posts all in a row for scrolling down, all with full data.

    On the website's blog's main page, they all show. If you click on "More" to see a list of free books you're on a 'More" or "next page"...

    To get back to the main page, click on the top title (or on a "Home" icon on the right side.

    Let me know what actually changed for you. I won't be back for a few hours but I will check to see.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Don,
    The 'Back' button will work too, if you clicked on "More" from the main page of many blog-entries.

    ReplyDelete

NOTE: TO AVOID SPAM being posted instantly, this blog uses the blogger.com "DELAY" feature.

Am often away much of the day, and postings won't show up right away. Posts done to use referrer-links may never show up.

Usually, am online enough to release comments within a day though, so the hard-to-read match-text tests for commenting won't be needed this way.

Feedback and questions are welcome. Thanks for participating.

Technical Problems?
If you're having problems leaving a Comment, Google's blogger-help asks that you clear the 'blogger.com' cookies on your browser's Tools or Options menu bar and that will fix the Comment-box problems (until they have a permanent fix).

IF that doesn't work either, then UNcheck the "keep me signed in" box -- Google-help says that should allow your comment to post (it's a workaround to a current bug).
Apologies for the problems.

TIP: There's a size limit. If longer than 3500 characters or so, in a text editor, make two posts out of it.

[Valid RSS]