Carmella Borchers

E-Book Borrowing Starting to Go Up

E-book borrowing, as opposed to purchases, are getting a lot more popular. This means increased revenues for authors and platform providers.

There are many books now available for e-readers such as the ever popular Amazon Kindle. All categories of books are available, such as Romance Novels, science fiction books, self- help guides, etc. This is one aspect of the Kindle which closely mimics how physical book stores operate. A user browses through a catalog containing millions of titles arranged in categories and then makes a purchase. 

Many books, such as romance books online are actually much cheaper than their paper versions, which have drawn a lot of people to online book purchasing and e-readers. But what about borrowing books, like in a library? Amazon has started a successful program that lets users do that as well. 

Members of Amazon Prime who have a Kindle e-reader can now borrow from over 75 000 digital books that have been published under the Kindle Direct Publishing program. The user pays nothing for the book, there are no due dates and can borrow up to one book per month. Authors earn money for each book that was borrowed under the program.

Some public libraries are also considering partnering up with Amazon in order to create a program where their members can borrow a certain quantity of Kindle electronic books per month for free. Many experts believe that this could have a positive effect on increasing the amounts of books that people read, even if reading a book is now done in electronic format as opposed to paper books.

Many online book sellers and publishers of eBooks are also considering using a different business model than paying for each book. For example, some publishers of erotic eBooks allow their customers to join a membership type site, where they can download an unlimited amount of book titles per month. In order to keep members interested in staying with the website, new titles are added to the collection every month and announcements are made to members about the titles that will be available soon. There is even some speculation that this business model could move more into the mainstream, with entire “Virtual Libraries” containing hundreds of thousands of titles that could be borrowed by readers. Some of these libraries could be private, for profit institutions that charge a membership fee per month or per year, while others could be non-profits that receive public funding or get donations from their members. One thing that is certain is that eBook readership is on the increase everywhere and this trend is likely to continue in the near future.

Read more : Sales of Reading Materials for Mobile Devices Expected to Go Up

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