Amazon Prime Members Can Borrow eBooks with Kindle Owners' Lending Library

Did you know that if you have a Prime membership on Amazon and live in the USA or UK, you can borrow one ebook a month via the Kindle Owners' Lending Library.

You can choose from 180,000+ ebooks FREE, including over 100 New York Times bestsellers. And there are no due dates.

A Prime membership has other advantages too. For only $79/year or £49/year, you'll also receive free 2-day shipping on millions of items on Amazon, plus unlimited streaming of over 25,000 movies and TV shows. There are other perks too. You can learn more about Prime here.

You can borrow directly from your Kindle (e-ink versions and Fire):

1. On e-ink devices (regular Kindles & Touch), click on "See all categories" then scroll down to "Kindle Owners' Lending Library" to view titles. Find a book and click on it to either buy or borrow for free.

2. On Kindle Fire devices, the Lending Library is located in the bookstore. Browse books and look for Prime badge. Click on a title and you'll have the option to either buy or borrow for free.

3. You can also borrow and read on an app for your desktop, iPad and more. Download your borrowed books directly from Amazon.com by looking for titles that show the Amazon Prime icon.

Remember, as a US or UK Prime member, you're entitled to 1 free borrow a month. That's 12 free books each year.

Don't own a Kindle? Get yours now. If you're not a US Prime member, start your one month free trial today. If you live in the UK, start your one month free trial of Prime here.


Borrow ebooks from Imajin Books authors. Look for the Prime icon on Amazon.

Imajin Books speaks out about the new Amazon Kindle library program

With the news release about the new library program that supplies Amazon Kindle ebooks to public and school library patrons comes the obvious question the many authors are asking: How the heck do I get paid if they're giving away my ebooks?

This is what I was told:

Only ebooks distributed through OverDrive will be available as library books for this program. As there are other benefits to being distributed by OverDrive, I've tried applying to them twice in the past year or so and was turned down both times—most likely because all the books published at the time were my own, which is no longer the case as my company Imajin Books now publishes other authors and operates much like a regular traditional publisher.

If your books are carried by OverDrive, your books are then available for this new library program. Currently this only applies to US public and school libraries.

It’s my understanding that once you've been accepted by OverDrive, they would pay either the publisher or independent author. But I'm still unclear as to how they operate. Do they only loan out an ebook one at a time and wait for it to be returned before it's loaned out again? Or are they sending out an ebook multiple times?

As an author and publisher, this program raises some red flags for me. And I'm not sure it's a bad thing that we aren't using OverDrive. I want my authors to be paid for their works. I want to be paid for mine too. And our publishing company relies on sales--not giving away our products.

I'm not alone. 

Macmillan and Simon & Schuster are not supplying ebooks to this library program, as the New York Times reported. Adam Rothberg, a spokesperson for Simon & Schuster states, "We haven’t yet found a business model with which we are comfortable and that we feel properly addresses the long-term interests of our authors."

I feel the way Rothberg does. Some of our ebooks ARE  currently available via Booklending.com, but not through this latest library program, and I'm not sure there is any advantage to Imajin Books or our authors to get involved. We work far too hard on these ebooks; we just can't be expected to provide unlimited content for free.