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Amazon has quietly pulled the plug on a Kindle feature that had allowed users to lend an eBook to friends.
Up until recently, you could loan eligible books Kindle titles to another user for up to two weeks. During that time, that person would be able to read the book, but it would not be available on your devices until it was returned. The idea was to replicate the experience of loaning a physical book. But users have noticed recently that Amazon no longer offers the ability to lend Kindle books.
Amazon’s hasn’t made an official announcement, but Book Riot’s Susie Dumond reports that after being alerted to the change by a reader, she was able to confirm that books in her library that had previously been eligible for lending could no longer be loaned out.
While I’ve never actually made use of this feature, I also skimmed through my Kindle library and cannot find the option to loan any of my purchased books.
That said, it appears that Amazon disabled Kindle eBook lending at the end of August, and the move didn’t garner much attention at the time, suggesting that maybe it wasn’t that popular a feature in the first place.
I do feel a little bad though for folks who wrote articles and/or published videos showing how to lend Kindle books as recently as mid-August… only to have those materials become obsolete a week or two later.