UPDATE: Amazon has now made the official announcement.
In the press release below, Amazon formally announces Harry Potter eBooks on the Kindle Owner Lenders Library:
Owning a Kindle just got a whole lot better for magic-loving Muggles. Starting June 19, Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) is adding all seven Harry Potter books (in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish) to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL). Harry Potter is the all-time best-selling book series in history, and Amazon has purchased an exclusive license from J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore to make the addition of these titles possible. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a benefit of Amazon Prime membership—Prime members also enjoy free two-day shipping on millions of items and unlimited streaming of more than 17,000 movies and TV episodes. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library has now grown to over 145,000 books that can be borrowed for free as frequently as once a month, with no due dates.
“We’re absolutely delighted to have reached this agreement with Pottermore. This is the kind of significant investment in the Kindle ecosystem that we’ll continue to make on behalf of Kindle owners,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “Over a year, borrowing the Harry Potter books, plus a handful of additional titles, can alone be worth more than the $79 cost of Prime or a Kindle. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library also has an innovative feature that’s of great benefit for popular titles like Harry Potter – unlimited supply of each title – you never get put on a waiting list.”
From the earlier version of this post:
After we shared a story yesterday about Amazon teasing an upcoming Harry Potter announcement, a Hypable reader (Jed!) did some digging and appears to have cracked the mystery.
A quick check of the source code for one of the promotional banners includes the filename “HP-KOLL-flyout._V148420599_” – KOLL stands for the Amazon Kindle feature “Kindle Owner Lenders Library.”
The Kindle Owner Lenders Library allows anyone with an Amazon Prime account ($70/year) to borrow select eBooks, one at a time with no due date, from Amazon’s Kindle store.
You can learn more about this feature on Amazon’s site. Is Amazon going too far by hyping up this announcement in advance? Will you borrow Harry Potter eBooks from them?
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