Amazon to allow gifting of Kindle eBooks

Amazon.com Inc. has begun allowing customers to give its Kindle eBooks to others, the Associated Press reports. Before, customers could only give gift certificates to cover the cost of an eBook. To receive a Kindle eBook gift, the recipient only needs an eMail address, not necessarily a Kindle eReader. Although the eReader starts at $139 for a version that can wirelessly download content over Wi-Fi, Amazon also offers a number of free applications that can be used to read Kindle books on gadgets such as laptops, tablet computers and smart phones…

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Amazon Kindle will let you lend your eBooks. Once. Maybe.

Amazon’s Kindle Team announced on Friday that it plans to make lending for Kindle available “soon,” reports ReadWriteWeb. The feature will allow you to loan your Kindle books to other Kindle devices or Kindle app users for a two-week period. This announcement brings to the Kindle one of the key features touted by the Barnes & Noble Nook: the ability to loan out your eBooks. But there are restrictions, of course. Some echo the restrictions of a printed, physical object: While the book is on loan and not on your bookshelf, so to speak, you don’t have access to it. You can’t read it until you get the eBook back. Why the laws of physics must hold for digital texts, I surely do not know. But some of the restrictions are particular to the eBooks and are likely to frustrate book-lovers and would-be-eBook-sharers…

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