Ebook readers continue become more and more popular. Yesterday, I flew from Florida to Massachusetts and it looked to me as if more than 25% of the airline passengers on my flights were reading ebook readers during the flight. In fact, I was doing the same. The popularity of these handheld devices is undoubtedly going to increase further with Amazon's latest announcement.
Thousands of Kindle ebooks will soon be available for free in America through 11,000 local public libraries.
To check out a book from a library, you must have a valid borrower's card from that library. In fact, I suspect this policy might revolutionize and re-invigorate libraries as never before.
When you borrow a Kindle public library book, you'll have access to all the unique features of Kindle books, including real page numbers and Whispersync technology that synchronizes your notes, highlights, and last page read. After a public library book expires, if you check it out again or choose to purchase it from the Kindle store, all of your annotations and bookmarks will be preserved.
You can read Amazon's full announcement at http://goo.gl/w9f13 with further details available at http://www.amazon.com/kindle/publiclibraries.
As you might expect, Amazon's announcement only covers the Kindle ebook readers, sold by Amazon. There is no mention of the many ebook readers sold by other companies. However, the manufacturers of the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony eBook Reader, and other such devices certainly must now be considering similar plans. The Amazon program is being managed by OverDrive and I wouldn't be surprised to read in a few months that OverDrive has similar reached agreements with several other companies to manage their programs.
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