paidcontent reporting:
Amazon is expanding the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which allows
Prime members who own a Kindle device to borrow one ebook a month for
free, to the United Kingdom, Germany and France later this month.
Amazon launched KOLL in the United States last November with a library of about 5,000 traditionally published titles — some of which weren’t included with the publishers’ permission
but, rather, were purchased by Amazon at the wholesale price each time a
user borrowed one. This caused a controversy that has since subsided as
KOLL has primarily become a vehicle for self-published authors to
promote their books: Amazon opened it up to self-published authors
in December 2011 through a program called KDP Select, and the library
now contains over 200,000 titles, nearly all of them self-published.
Authors are paid out of a fund each time their ebook is borrowed. (In
exchange for including books in the KOLL, self-published authors must sell them exclusively through Kindle for a period of at least 90 days.) All seven Harry Potter ebooks are also available through the KOLL in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.
It is unclear how many people in Europe will be eligible to borrow
ebooks from the KOLL. Amazon has not released Prime membership numbers
in any country, but it seems safe to assume that there are fewer members
of “Amazon Premium” in the UK, France or Germany than there are in the
United States, and fewer still who own a Kindle. But the expansion of
the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to Europe comes at a time when Amazon
is heavily promoting its self-publishing capabilities on the continent.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair this week, Amazon has been holding daily
sessions for international audiences about how to self-publish their
books on Kindle.
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