Amazon: Early Data Shows Kindle Owners’ Lending Library Increases Sales

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Amazon’s early data from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which allows Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) prime members who are also Kindle owners to borrow one free e-book per month, “suggests the possibility of an increase in customer purchasing,” Kindle content VP Russ Grandinetti said at Digital Book World today.

Grandinetti said “we’re trying to be skeptical about this” but Amazon’s early data “suggests you can get people engaged in a book that they weren’t interested in otherwise.” Amazon compared two customer groups of Amazon Prime members who have owned an e-reading device for more than six months and have made at least one recent book purchase in the last 30 days. The members of one group used the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and the members of the other group did not. Grandinetti said that after after the average customer’s first borrow from the KOLL, he or she went on to purchase 30 percent more books.

“Many publishers in this room give away books for free every day in a very coarse effort to increase demand,” Grandinetti said. He argued that the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a more refined approach backed by a lot of promotion on the Amazon website. “Some customers may be willing to try authors and series they might not otherwise have discovered,” he said. He gave an example, the very popular Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Nineteen percent of customers who borrowed The Hunger Games from the KOLL later purchased one of the other books in the trilogy instead of waiting another thirty days to borrow it.
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