Many, many people will be getting a Kindle for Christmas. If the numbers continue then Amazon will have sold more than 5 million kindles (all models together) in November and December. This is a lot of new Kindle owners. One of the first things that most new kindle owners will do is start filling it with books. If you do not have a lot of money to spend on books, your two options are Free Books and borrowing books. You can try to borrow books from your friends. But a better option is the Kindle Book Sharing sites. There are several independent lending sites. Bookwi.se reviewed Lendle last week. This week I am taking at look at Booklending.com.
Booklending.com has a very easy start up. There is a very basic set up and then you can borrow books without lending. So if you are just getting started with a kindle and have not purchased any books, then Booklending.com is an easy way to get started reading quickly. Booklending does not have a lot of options. Click “Lend a Book” when you are ready to lend a book. You can add your books and form a profile, or you can look at recent borrow requests to see if you have any books that have been requested. When I looked there were several books I owned that have been recently requested and I quickly loaned two books.
When you actually loan a book Booklending puts Amazon in a window (frame) with the information about loaning at the top frame. You copy (or type) the email address of the borrower into the normal Amazon loaning page. Then confirm that you have loaned the book. That is it. Very simple.
The Borrow a Book options are basically the same. You can type in the book (or author of a book) that you want to borrow and you just push the “Borrow” button. You can also browse books that have been recently loaned. When you choose to borrow the book a pop-up will tell you that either no one has the book already in their profiles to loan to you and that you will be notified when it is available or you are told it is available and you will be notified when someone has lent the book to you. You can also look on your profile to determine what books are available and what books are not currently available. What would be better is some way to tell if a book is available before you request the book instead of looking on your profile after you have requested the book.
Booklending.com is tightly integrated with Facebook. It uses Facebook comments under its book discussions. You can use Facebook as your login. This is great unless you do not participate in Facebook.
One last feature that is both useful and important to Booklending making money, is that they notify you when books that you would like to lend drop in price. Handy to know and Booklending will make a cut of any of the sales to keep them in business.
Overall, I prefer Lendle as a book sharing option. But there is not a good reason not to use both. The sites have different users and likely there will be books at one site that are not at the other. In my browsing and requests it seems like Booklending had fewer books than Lendle, but it might just be that I was requesting the wrong books.
Lendle also requires that you lend books to borrow books. I think that in the long term that this will ensure that Lendle has more books because users are both contributors and borrows. Lendle also says how many books that they have to loan in the system and whether a book is available to borrow before you request it. There is also the minor issue of getting a small Amazon credit when you loan books on Lendle. Booklending also does not have the ability book reserve a book without borrowing it immediately, which as an avid reader that reads between 5 and 8 books at a time, I need. Booklending also has adverting (Lendle has advertising for non-patron users.) I prefer the loaning process on Lendle, but both work well.
Booklending is a nice looking site, but is not as feature rich and does not appear to have as many books as Lendle.
Related articles
- Lendle – A Kindle book sharing site (bookwi.se)
- Lendle – A Kindle Borrowing Site: Review After 6 Weeks (bookwi.se)
- Kindle Owner’s Lending Library: New Service for Prime Members (bookwi.se)
- How to Lend a Kindle Book (bookwi.se)