U.S. Kindle Users Can Now Borrow E-Books from Local Libraries
September 22nd, 2011DISCLOSURE: Cryptogon is an Amazon affiliate.
This whole Kindle thing moved so fast that I didn’t really have a chance to form my nonspecific sense of doom about it into much besides, Amazon is Tracking the Most-Highlighted Kindle Passages.
And now, people will be signing into their Amazon accounts to borrow ebooks from public libraries.
So it goes…
Via: Amazon (Link does not contain my affiliate code):
You can check out a Kindle book from your local library and read it on any generation Kindle device or free Kindle reading app.
When you borrow a Kindle public library book, you’ll have access to all the unique features of Kindle books, including real page numbers and Whispersync technology that synchronizes your notes, highlights, and last page read. After a public library book expires, if you check it out again or choose to purchase it from the Kindle store, all of your annotations and bookmarks will be preserved.
Kindle books are available at more than 11,000 libraries in the U.S.
How It Works
You can borrow Kindle books from your local library’s website and, with the click of a button, have them delivered to your Kindle device or free reading app.
* Visit the website of a U.S. library that offers digital services from OverDrive.
* Check out a Kindle book (using a valid library card).
* Click on “Get for Kindle” and then sign in to your Amazon.com account to have the book delivered to your Kindle device or reading app.
Note: Public library books can be sent wirelessly to Kindle devices via an active Wi-Fi connection or transferred via USB.
Even after all these years, and SO much available information demonstrating the horrific effects of emitted radiation on the human meatsack (including more than a few DoD safety films), the Amazing Word of Techno-Crack still has hooks in my neural net.
The Kindle appeals in the same way the Digital Jukebox appeals, all arguments of tonal quality aside.
As a music aficianado, it’s long been a dream: having literally everything — a whole wall’s worth of accumulated media — literally at one’s fingertips. I have that here, now. And yes, it’s everything it was cracked up to be. The reality met my fairly pragmatic expectations.
Moving books and other accumulated texts into a similar realm pushes all the same buttons. All the right buttons. There’s an inherent sense of utility in it that resonates deeply and loudly within the heart & soul of my inner archivist.
But the lifelong Tech in me always pipes in with a comment sure to corrode any shiny techno-romanticism lingering on the surface:
“…but what about battery life?”
“…how f**ked up is the DRM schema?”
“…who’s keeping track of what I read?”
That’s just it with the whole Net concept in general. It’s one massive killer app, bringing every single one of those trips to the library back when I was just an angry young rock and roll dissident seeking answers straight to my office desktop.
What’s not to love?
Right about here Techie pipes up again:
“…yeah, but WTF about the other edge of the sword there, you pinhead?”
“…what good is your virtual library card when the connection goes down?”
“…what is the exact distance between dependence and addiction, I wonder?”
Given Amazon’s history as the 800-pound digital gorilla that squashed an awful lot of big box book retailers, after they in turn had killed a slew of independents (including my favorite shop back when), I expect their throwing in behind the Kindle qualifies as an omen of sorts.
Of course, just as cassette was supposed to kill vinyl (it didn’t) and CD was supposed to kill it again (it hasn’t), the “end of books” is being prophesied by the usual round of industry-funded prognosticators just as myopic as the last.
Cynical ME, who worked in and around PR and marketing crafting expensive “industry-speak” says: it’s just more of the same.
Low-level commercial programming crafted to push the appropriate limbic buttons and loosen the wallet hand. Doesn’t need to be all that subtle. In fact, too much subtlety is usually a bad idea.
Conspiratorial ME, who’s read WAY too much woo-woo stuff over the years thanks largely to an early taste for Vonnegut, as usual goes a bit further:
What better way to monitor and control the ever-evolving currents and flows of information through society writ large than digitize it ALL and drive everyone except marginalized fringe types and “neo-Luddites” into the new model via desire-driven commercialization?
Inevitability is the word that comes to mind. Either you participate or you exist in a ghost world, are viewed as a relic, a throwback, an anachronism. That alone makes you suspicious. Probably some sort of fundamentalist. Maybe even a terrorist…