Amazon has added another enticement to sign up for the Amazon Prime service. Now, when you pay your $79 annual fee, you get access to a lending library of Kindle books. You can check out one book a month. When you download a new book, the old one disappears. I was fully expecting it to be the kind of books that aren’t selling but it appears they have some pretty popular ones. Maybe not the tip top of the best seller list but some decent titles.
Besides the book lending, Prime members get free shipping and streaming TV and movies over a browser.
Prime is all in the interest of building attractive paths to the cash register, of course. If you borrow books and the borrow period runs out, you buy them. Or you buy books from that same author. And with free shipping, you buy more from Amazon to justify the free shipping. Not that there’s anything wrong with what Amazon’s doing but it’s important to remember that it’s not out of the goodness of its heart, it’s because it’s a for-profit business.
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