Lendle is a free website that lets you connect with Kindle owners, and lend Kindle books to them, and borrow Kindle books from them. So, if you are looking to borrow books for your Kindle, but do not know any friend that has that book, you can use Lendle. Lendle is completely free to use. In fact, if you lend books with Lendle, they pay you a small amount for that.
Notes: 1. Kindle book lending program works with Kindle owners in USA only (as of now). So, if you are not based in USA, Lendle will not work for you.
2. To Lend or borrow a book, you do not need to own Kindle. It will work even if you have Kindle for PC, Kindle Cloud Reader, or Kindle app on your smartphone or tablet computer.
When Amazon launched Kindle book lending program, it was touted as a major advantage of Kindle, as it made possible to lend and borrow ebooks, in the same manner as you can lend or borrow physical copies of books. However, it might sometimes become difficult to find a book that you want to borrow, as none of your friends might posses that book. That’s where Lendle comes in picture.
Once you create a free account with Lendle, it will show you all the books that are available to be borrowed. You can just put a borrow request for that, and the owner of that book will lend that book to you. It is as simple as that.
And when you lend your books to others, Lendle will credit a small amount to your Lendle account, that you can redeem in form of Amazon gift cards.
Here is how Lendle works:
- You sign up for a free Lendle account at Lendle.me. After that, you can search Lendle for the books that you have in your Kindle library, and add those books to your Lendle library. I really wish there was a way that Lendle could automatically find which books are present in your Kindle library, and add them.
- After that, you can select which books are you ready to lend.
- When someone needs one of those books, Lendle will send you a borrow request. You’ll have 7 days to accept or reject that request. After that, book will be lent out for 14 days. During this period, the book will not be available for you to read (as you have already lent it out). Note: As a part of lending process, you are taken to Amazon, where you actually lend the book. Lendle just provides an interface to see which lend requests are available for your books.
- Once the person reads the book, or 14 days expire, the book is automatically returned back to your Kindle library.
- In case you want to borrow some book, you search Lendle for name of that book, and put a borrow request on that.
- Once someone accepts your borrow request, the book gets added to your Kindle library, and you get 2 weeks to read the book.
- After that, the book is returned to the original owner, automatically.
Some of the things to Note about Lendle / Kindle Lending Program:
- Each book can be lent just once (this is a restriction imposed by Amazon).
- Works only with US based Amazon accounts.
- When you sign up for Lendle, you get 2 Borrow requests that you can use to borrow two books. After that, activities that you perform on the site earn you more borrow requests. For example, if you lend books, you also earn borrow requests.
- In case you do not lend books yourselves, Lendle will not give you borrow requests.
- It is completely free. They have a pro version also for which you can pay, and get more borrow requests than free users.
Overall, Lendle is quite revolutionary. In the hindsight, Amazon could have included this service itself with its Kindle lending program. Nevertheless, Lendle recognized the need, and has made this worthy service that makes it very easy to lend and borrow books for Kindle.
Check out Lendle. In case you know of any other similar service, do let us know in comments.