Is Amazon feeling Heat from the Competition? The Kindle is finally open to Free Online Library Books

For years, if you wanted to read free online library books, you had to choose something other than a Kindle - your laptop, your smartphone, a Nook, or the Sony reader. Librarians around the country now though, will no longer have to use the well-rehearsed consolation tone in which they inform disappointed library members that the Kindle never was open to library books. In a statement that reverses Amazon’s express policy in the matter, the company has said that from now on, all free online library books are going to run on the Kindle. That would include the 10,000 or more public libraries there are in the country.

The Kindle, a product so famous that for the most part has come to be synonymous for the e-book reader device itself, has baffled fans all over the country, forever, with its library book ban. Everyone's always been trying to find some kind of hack that will allow them to use library books on their Kindle. Perhaps what changed Amazon's mind was how tech writers have been writing the Kindle's obituary ever since the iPad 2 came out.

Of course, this doesn't crumble all the barriers there are to accessing free e-books. Lots of publishers are extremely uncomfortable having their books becoming borrowable. They try to impose the strictest of conditions on libraries - the way they do when they say that an e-book sold to a library expires in one year. But that sounds positively generous compared to what some other publishers feel. Simon & Schuster and Macmillan have completely boycotted public libraries altogether.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Amazon opened themselves up to free online library books. They were beginning to lose market share to the Barnes & Noble’s Nook. That device has color, it has an open platform and it has a technology partnership with e-book software giant Adobe.

Amazon is designed has quite a bit of flexibility and thoughtfulness into its new Kindle library book program. To begin with, the Kindle’s WhisperSync technology that allows you to highlight passages and write annotations in the margins, works on these library books too. You can be safe in the knowledge that you won't be pulled up for vandalism. When you check the book out later at any time in the future, you'll find that Kindle has kept track of your annotations for you. Should you ever decide to buy that same book, Kindle will remember your annotations then too.