The Kindle Online Lending Library (KOLL), which was launched last year and allows US Amazon Prime members to borrow one enrolled ebook each month, is coming to the UK, France and Germany later this month. Amazon announced the news this week, but there are still some rather important details to come.
It looks like the European KOLL will work the same way as its US counterpart. Here’s the UK KOLL page, and here are the pages for Germany and France. Only Prime users will be able to borrow, and it’s unclear how many Prime members Amazon has in these countries. It would certainly seem that there will be far fewer borrows than authors have been seeing in the US.
To cover the likely increase in borrows from Europe, Amazon has announced that the KDP Select fund for October has been increased by $100,000, to a total of $700,000. A “larger increase” is anticipated for November. The big question is whether this increase will ensure that the payout per loan for authors will remain more or less the same, having hovered around the $2 mark for the past few months.
I was wondering why the amount was raised. Hadn’t thought about the increase from the UK and Europe.
Posted by Jill James | October 13, 2012, 12:02 am