Quote:
Originally Posted by sirmaru
Amazon offers 1.7 million eBooks to Prime members for borrowing. About 55,000 eBooks are offered to everyone at zero cost with an invoice generated.
The zero cost ebooks generate an invoice at "purchase" and are made at the Amazon site. The borrowed ebooks are done at the device level.
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ALL books published prior to 1924 are FREE at Amazon.
Public libraries require the return of the book in a period from 2 weeks to one month. Borrowing an eBook at Amazon has no defined return period. One can keep it for months and years if required. However, one can take out only one at a time.
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I thought marketing spam was banned here!
the only pertinent fact in the above is your estimate of 55k books available on zero cost, but only for kindle hardware owners who also subscribe to prime ( kindle for pc is excluded) and limited to one book at a time { actually is is also limited to 1 per month but you omit that }. AFAIK , the pay to rent option is USA only.
my local state library has a much smaller collection but it is free to join, the annual fee is zero, the lending fee is zero, & there are no overdue fines ever because books are recalled automatically. I can read on PC if I so wish.
I did a random check on amazon Uk for fiction authors that I like to see how many of their kindle books were "prime eligible" and thus available for free loa., The answer was none. IMHO its an overhyped, overpriced gimmick, not a real alternative to a proper lending library
all books published prior to 1924 are free everywhere, not just at amazon