Lendle (a service I first noticed mentioned on Daring Fireball) is a front for Amazon’s Kindle book loan feature, which allows Kindle users to share books (free of charge) with any other Kindle user. Lendle helps facilitate the loaning of Kindle books between two unacquainted parties.

As an owner of Kindle books, you post what you have on Lendle, and request what you’d like. Per Amazon’s rules, you have 14 days to read the book before it is returned to the owner (and disappears from your Kindle collection).

Here’s some brief screenshots of the process:

The entire “transaction” occurs on Amazon’s site, not Lendle. You just use Lendle to initiate the process.

You can check the status of your loaned and requested books on Lendle:

My thoughts

I love how Lendle has taken the limitations of “known Kindle users” out of the equation. I used to think digital book lending would be great, but I honestly don’t know more than a handful of Kindle users. That limits the range of available books to request to a very small collection.

Lendle provides an almost limitless scope of available book titles, since I don’t need to know the Kindle user to borrow from them.

I do think the 14-day loan period should be extended to at least 21 days, because I believe most traditional libraries allow this, even for new releases (or maybe it is two weeks for new releases, and three weeks for older books).

Who knows, though – the short loan window may force me to actually read the books relatively fast, as opposed to taking months to finish a book. Sometimes pressure is a good thing.