Amazon lends e-books free to Prime subscribers Amazon’s UK wing is now a lending library, albeit a private one exclusive to folk willing to cough up £49 a year. Yes, Amazon Prime subscribers with Kindles can now borrow any of 200,000 e-books for no charge other than their annual Prime sub. They can pick no more than one book a month, but there’s no digital equivalent of …
Well, yes, you can get free 'Super-Saver' delivery. Which is fine for some things. But if it's a large or fragile item, that usually means that for no extra charge some bloke from "Craptacular Delivery Organisation" will drop-kick it over the wall and into your next-door-neighbour's pond for you rather than actually deliver it to your door.
Yeah, they have a habit of using those HDNL morons and the packaging is always dinged when they deliver something.
They also use City Sprint, who, to be fair, are pretty good, better than DPD who just bugger off without attempting to deliver half the time.
I do wish Amazon would provide options though, as you say.
You want an option to USE DPD? Are you mad? I'd like the exact opposite option.
Every time Amazon use DPD to deliver to me I have a problem. Usually the guy doesn't even bother to get out of his van when he realises he'll have to climb two flights of stairs. One time they claimed to have delivered a parcel but the signature was not the name of anyone in my building. I have never had a painless, successful delivery from DPD.
There is.
Just click the button that says "First class Delivery" when you order, instead of "Guaranteed Next Day".
I use it, because First Class doesn't need a signature.
And the £49 per year is not per person, as someone else said - it's for a family. It's excellent value.
"Members who own Kindle devices can also choose from thousands of books -- including more than 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers -- to borrow and read for free, as frequently as a book a month with no due dates, from the Kindle Owners' Lending Library".
from https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=lp_mem_help?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200182130
Clicking through to the link for the Kindle Owners' Lending Library confirms that it does not work with Kindle apps on other devices.
So it's only a good deal if you've got the kit.
That is a pretty crap restriction. I read books through various kindle apps on my PCs, phone and tablet. But I don't own a kindle so, despite having been a prime subscriber for many years, I'm excluded from this. Along with the free films that they get in the US and the ability to lend books to other kindle users (also US) Amazon seem to be going out of their way to annoy large segments of their users.
I read a lot more than a book a month... for the price of Prime, I can usually just buy a book a month. I mean, seriously; who takes a month to read a book? A much better solution would be to only allow you to check out one book at a time - return it, and you can immediately check out a new one. If that's one a month, fine; if that's a dozen a day, that's fine too. On average, any given user will only have one book checked out at a time.
Free as in, I already pay for prime so I'm getting something in addition to what I was expecting for nothing more. Sounds free to me. For some it may not be.
At the end of the day it's your money if you don't want to spend it don't spend it, nobody is forcing you to buy amazon e-readers, there are others on the market,. Nobody is forcing you to buy amazon's eBooks.
Well, at least all you ill-informed twats ranting pro and con have motivated me into setting up that little python thing that strips the DRM off ebooks, so I suppose I can lend my ebooks to whoever I choose, too :D
(It's free, quick and easy, I recommend it.. if you want to play too, see:
http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/drm-removal-tools-for-ebooks/
Have another day.)
Drastically reducing the price of books (in this case to free) may be good for retailers who can use it as a promotional tool for their other product, but it's not good for the publishing industry, and it can't be good for writers and writing.
This seems to me an extraordinary turn of events whereby Amazon does what the eff it will with the book rights it's piled up: what will they do with the rights next - give them away with every Amazon-branded lollipop?
If these books are by living authors who are selling OK, this measure is a bomb under the publishing industry.
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