Amazon News Alert: Library Lending is coming!

After years of people begging, Amazon is bringing Library Lending capability to Kindle later this year! In an announcement today they said "you will be able to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 public libraries in the U.S.!"

I haven't read the entire press release yet, but some big details:

• Kindle Library Lending will be available for all generations of Kindle devices and free Kindle reading apps. 
• Notes & highlights (love this one!): While they won't be visible to other customers, if a Kindle book is checked out again or that book is purchased from Amazon, all of a customer's annotations and bookmarks will be preserved. 
• Amazon is working with OverDrive, the leading provider of digital content solutions for over 11,000 public and educational libraries in the United States

I'm not sure how much I will personally use it. I already have over 200 free and low price books in my To Be Read folder - I will be reading them for a long time, and I understand that library wait times for ebooks is very long. 

Though I wonder... it doesn't seem like these will be ePubs. If notes and annotations are easily transferred if you decide to buy the book from Amazon at a later date, then I assume this means they will be regular Kindle format (.azw) rather than ePubs - if so, Kindle users might not be competing in line with Nook & Sony Reader owners.

Don't have a Kindle? See details at Amazon.