Kindle library loans

Kindle just released their ebooks for loan at 11,000 libraries in the U.S.! This is great news for us. We’ve been waiting for this since Amazon announced their intentions last April.

Up to now, library loans had been available in formats compatible with other digital readers (eg. nook, Overdrive), but Kindle was the last holdout. We had  received a Kindle from a generous friend who didn’t like the ebook format, and it will be our main source of reading material along our travels. We can get Lonely Planet guidebooks on the Kindle, and we have a New Yorker subscription on the Kindle for when we miss our old home, but we’re both voracious readers and had been wondering what to do about having so much free time during our trip and no access to choice reading materials. We could make do with whatever we find at second-hand bookstores and book swaps on the road, and we also have been downloading a lot of the free, public domain Kindle books, but with so much time to read, it would be a shame not to tackle our to-read lists.

One of our tactics for saving money for this trip was to quit buying books and start using the library for all of our reading. I would estimate this saved us at least $1,200 (not to mention a place to put them in our over-full bookshelves)  over the last two years. We are now huge fans of libraries and are even using them in Montreal while we’re here with my dad. With Kindle library loans, we can continue reading as much as we want on the road without spending a cent!

With a Kindle, we are saving space in backpacks as well as money. We’ll be doing a post in the near future about what other stuff is going in our packs (clothes, tech gear, etc.).