Amazon adds Harry Potter ebooks to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library

by Public Libraries on May 10, 2012

Harry Potter

Great news for Harry Potter fans that own a Kindle and were thinking about buying digital versions of the treasured series by J.K. Rowling.  Amazon announced today that all seven Harry Potter ebooks will be available in the Kindle Owners’ Lendling Library on June 19th.

So you will be able to borrow the Harry Potter ebooks for free if you own a Kindle and you subscribe to Amazon Prime.  The Amazon Prime subscription currently costs $79 per year.  It lets you borrow one ebook for free each month and currently has over 145,000 ebooks to choose from.  Prime also gives you access to a large library of streaming videos that you can watch for free as well as free two-day shipping on products Amazon sells.

Adding the Harry Potter ebooks to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a huge win for Amazon.  Harry Potter is the best selling series of all time.  The announcement shines a huge light on the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.  People will want to find out what it is and will wonder what other great ebooks they could get for free if they join.  Having the Harry Potter ebooks available for free to Kindle owners with Prime subscriptions will probably result in more Kindle sales and more Prime subscriptions as well.

The deal will drastically benefit Amazon but it will probably help J.K. Rowling out too.  If you borrow a Harry Potter ebook from Amazon and decide you want to buy it you will be redirected to Pottermore.  Pottermore is a website that J.K. Rowling has chosen as the only place where the Harry Potter ebooks will be sold.  The is “a unique online experience from J.K. Rowling, built around the Harry Potter books.”.  Having the Harry Potter ebooks in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library will definitely make more people aware of Rowling’s Pottermore site.

Of course if you want to borrow the Harry Potter ebooks for free there is another way.  J.K. Rowling decided to make the Harry Potter ebooks available at libraries through OverDrive.  This is unusual because most book publishers have chosen to not to make their ebooks available at public libraries.  So there is a good chance you will find the Harry Potter ebooks at your local library and you won’t need a Kindle to be able to borrow them.

Signing a deal to add the Harry Potter ebooks to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a gigantic win for Amazon and the ebook subscription model.  It will be interesting to see if Amazon is able to get ebooks from other popular authors into their “library” as well.

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