Back when I was a kid growing up in a small coastal town, I would frequently go to the backyard and walk toward the wall that separated our house from the neighbor's, climb up, and ask for some vinegar, cooking oil, salt, or whatever cooking ingredient my grandmother asked me to go borrow next door.
That's what I call borrowing old-school style.
These days, of course, the borrowing process is a bit more high tech. Take the case of Amazon, which just launched its Kindle book lending feature with more than 11,000 libraries. That means e-bookworms with a Kindle, library card and access to the InterWebs can now borrow a Kindle book from a library with as little physical effort as possible. Hooray for progress.
So how does this whole Kindle book lending work? Here's the short and sweet way to do it:
- Visit the library: And by that, I mean the Web site of a library that participates in the program, of course. Basically, the library must offer digital services via Overdrive. A good example is the Seattle Public Library, which served as the initial guinea pig, er, test site for the Kindle lending service.
- Check out your Kindle book: Once you get to the requisite library, work your way through the menus until you get to the section where they show their Kindle e-books. As an example, here's the Kindle Book section of the Seattle Public Library. Wow, it's got more than 25,000 Kindle books to lend! Unfortunately, libraries still have a limit on how many books they can lend out so there's a good chance that if you're borrowing a popular book, it may be unavailable. If so, there should be an option to get placed on a waiting list. Just to reiterate, you will need to have a library card with whatever library you want to borrow from. That's just how the whole library lending thing works, OK?
- Get your book: If you're fortunate enough to have a copy available of the book you want to borrow, then go ahead and click the "Get for Kindle" button. You will then be directed to sign in to your Amazon account where you can have the book sent to your Kindle reader or Kindle app.
And, that's basically it. Folks who have questions can visit Amazon's Kindle Library Lending Help Page or send an e-mail to: kindle-publiclibraries-feedback@amazon.com
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