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If you’ve jumped on the bandwagon of electronic books, then you might notice one thing that is lacking in them….the small economy of being able to borrow books for them. There are ways to borrow them from your local library in ePub or PDF, but if your library is like mine, the selection isn’t large. I have also noticed on many eBook retailer sites, including Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com that there are often books that the publisher offers for free for a limited time to download.
But books, even electronic ones, can be pricey to purchase, and if you read like me (a book every three or four days), you want other options to read newer releases at no (or little) cost. eBook Fling is a service that allows people to lend their eBooks to other people for 14 days.
The membership is free, and you can earn credits to ‘borrow’ other people’s eBooks by listing your own titles on the site to lend out to others. Not all books are available for borrowing or lending (since that is determined by the publisher). You can offer your books as instant downloads, which means that you will get your credit instantly in your account for offering it. Alternatively you can list the books, and when someone is interested in reading it, you will receive an e-mail and then you can loan it out to them, at which time you will get your credit.
Each book you loan out will give you a credit, likewise if you borrow someone else’s book you ‘pay’ a credit. If you’re account is out of credits you can buy them for $1.99 each.
I got to try the service out, and it definitely has its appeal.
The Upside:
If you are willing to lend out your books for 14 days – you can earn an unlimited amount of credits to borrow books from others. It will cost you nothing. It’s easy to add them to the offerings and they will be returned to your Kindle/Nook account when the lending period is up.
$1.99 to purchase a credit to borrow a book you’ve been wanting to read, but can’t find at your library for download and/or you don’t want to purchase it, is a pretty good bargain. I found a number of books on eBook Fling that I have been wanting to read, so it’s a win/win for me.
The Downside:
Because it is a newer service, and is completely dependent on people listing their eBooks for lending, the selection is a little sparse. Many of the books I found to download were books that have been offered for free from the publishers.
Both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble on allow you to loan the book out to one person for the 14 day period. That means once it’s loaned out, it can never be loaned out again. Also right now, all Nook books on the site are unavailable for lending. The ‘lender’ also has to remember to then take the book off their page of available lending, since it can’t be loaned out again.
That 14 day period is great for people like me who read quickly. For people like my husband though who take more time to read, or for larger novels with a lot of pages, 14 days isn’t really practical especially since the book can’t be loaned out again.
Unless I missed it, there is no way to navigate the ‘Instant Download’ books. You can choose to view Kindle, Nook or Kindle and Nook downloads but that’s it. It makes it wearisome to have to wade through books you aren’t interested in. It would be nice to be able to see a filter for genre.
Overall I think this is a really neat service, and I’ll definitely continue using it if I can find books on their that I’ve been wanting to read, but not purchase.
You can find out more about eBook Fling on their website http://www.ebookfling.com.
This is such a great idea! Too bad the limitations make it difficult to fully use it more like a virtual library, but maybe over time that will change.
I'm going to check it out, thanks!
Awesome. Thanks for the review and the information on the site. I'm a reader like you – I'll read a book or two over the weekend! Borrowing is a great way to share ebooks.
Do you know if EBookFling is still operating?. It sounds like such a great idea. But I only discovered it today and the website can’t be found
Unfortunately I think they went out a business. 🙁