"Lend books to your friends" - coming soon to Kindle

Amazon today announced that they will soon be offering the ability to lend books to your friends for up to 14 days providing that the book publishers allow this. this feature is already available on the Nook e-book reader. A firmware upgrade will most likely be needed for this feature to be enabled.

This will be available to book Kindle users and Kindle app users on other platforms. The feature is to come later this year.

Amazon said: "We will be introducing lending for Kindle, a new feature that lets you loan your Kindle books to other Kindle device or Kindle app users. Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period. Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable - this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending. "

Amazon also announced that "we are making Kindle newspapers and magazines readable on our free Kindle apps, so you can always read Kindle periodicals even if you don't have your Kindle with you or don't yet own a Kindle. In the coming weeks, many newspapers and magazines will be available on our Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, and then we'll be adding this functionality to Kindle for Android and our other apps down the road. Our vision is Buy Once, Read Everywhere, and we're excited to make this possible for Kindle periodicals in the same way that it works now for Kindle books. More details when we launch this in the coming weeks."