Looking for lendable books? Good news!
Sometimes our focus on lending restrictions can seem a bit glass half empty, so we thought we’d end the work week on a glass half full post.
We were recently involved in a discussion in which it was posited that perhaps Amazon was responsible for the dearth of lendable titles in the Kindle store and, lacking evidence, we simply said we didn’t know.
There is some evidence, though, that Amazon is eager to open up lending. First and foremost, there’s the early Jeff Bezos comment that lending on the Nook was “extremely limiting.” He even went so far as to agree that it presented something of a Sophie’s Choice for readers! Of course, Amazon has since adopted Barnes and Noble’s model for their own lending service.
The more compelling evidence is that every single book sold via Amazon’s own publishing imprints is lending enabled, as far as we can tell. We think Amazon deserves kudos for that, and as a lot of our readers are interested in finding new lendable titles, we thought we’d feature them, here. These aren’t perfect links (we just searched the Kindle store by the name of the imprint) but this should give you a pretty good place to start your search for new content:
This is Amazon’s newest imprint and the titles listed here are pre-order only. If Mystery is your thing, this seems like it’ll be a good place to look in the near future.
This appears to be a hodgepodge of genres, focusing on emerging authors. Official site.
“Translations of foreign language books from around the world.” Official site.
This is actually a partnership with Seth Godin that is “powered by” Amazon:
The Domino Project is a new way to think about publishing. Founded by Seth Godin and powered by Amazon, we’re trying to change the way books are built, sold and spread.
This is the one that has us convinced that Amazon would like to expand lending and try some new models. Official site.
Some of you are romance fans, right? Montlake is all romance, all the time. This is a new imprint, so expect it to fill out over the next several months.
The selection is still fairly limited when it comes to these imprints, but given time, we think Amazon will build a nice little library of lending-enabled content. We hope that they’ll eventually use these imprints as a playground for innovation. Perhaps Jeff Bezos sees this as his opportunity to show off a less limited lending model?
At any rate, we’ve always said that the best way to ensure lending in the future is to support lending-friendly publishers in the present. As it stands, Amazon appears to be leading the charge.
Go buy some books!
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