Amazon.com today announced that the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is coming to the UK, Germany and France later this month. Independent authors and publishers using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) who enroll their books in KDP Select can be included in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library in the UK, Germany and France, as well as the USA.
With the new lending libraries launching this month, the KDP Select fund has been increased by $100,000 to $700,000 in October, with a larger increase anticipated in November. Authors will earn money every time their book is borrowed from any of the lending libraries – in September, authors earned $2.29 per borrow, which is more than many KDP books earn per sale.
Independent authors are experiencing increased sales by including their books in the US Kindle Owners’ Lending Library through KDP Select, an option for authors to make money through the lending library and promote their book for free. In September, KDP Select books that enrolled in August earned 77% more royalties from paid sales than the three months before they were enrolled in the program.
The Kindle Owners Lending Library was launched in the US in November 2011 and offers access to a wide array of categories and genres in fiction and non-fiction. Soon Kindle owners with a Prime membership in the UK, Germany and France will also be able to choose from over 200,000 books to borrow for free – including thousands of local-language titles and all seven Harry Potter books in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish – as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. No other e-reader or eBook store offers such a service.
