Borrowing a Kindle book to a family or friend was pretty easy with the Kindle Lending Library, launched in 2011. However, the program was discontinued on January 4, 2021. This 10-year-old program was very popular in the early years of Kindle but disappeared when Prime Reading was launched in 2016. What other ways are there to share Kindle books in 2024?
The only way to share Kindle e-books in 2024 is this Set up a family library with a feature called Amazon Household. The function can only be shared with the same family: two adults and four children. When you create your Amazon household, you can choose which Amazon content you want to share. If you left the eBooks option enabled, your library will automatically appear on your other family members’ Kindles. The Kindle household e-books in the library can also be shared with the Kindle app for Android or iOS.
Amazon offers a complete step-by-step guide that walks you through setting up the budgeting system and everything you need to do to select individual book titles or the entire library.
However, sharing books with friends or strangers is impossible because Amazon has discontinued all the old programs that allowed this. Even their competitors like Barnes and Noble Nook or Rakuten Kobo do not have a credit system.
Michael Kozlowski is editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
