Harry Potter for Free from Amazon Kindle

If you own an Amazon Kindle and have Amazon Prime, you can say Avada Kedavra to paying a dime for the entire Harry Potter series. Amazon has recently acquired the exclusive rights to make the series part of its Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. This means all 7 Harry Potter books will be available to be digitally “borrowed” starting on June 19.

How does the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library work?

Step 1: Purchase a Kindle

Step 2: Purchase Amazon Prime (did you know you can get additional benefits if you’re a Mom?)

Step 3: Lookup any of the 145,000+ titles available in the Lending Library and then select “Borrow for Free”.

So what’s the catch?

There are a few downsides:

1. You must buy a Kindle and Amazon Prime. This doesn't work with the Amazon Kindle apps for iOS, Windows Phone, or the PC even if you have a Kindle and Amazon Prime.
2. You must initiate the borrowing from your Kindle device. You can’t browse the Amazon website on your PC, borrow it, and have it sent to your Kindle. This is unfortunate because this workflow is seamless if you were to purchase the same eBook on Amazon.
3. You can only borrow one book at a time and can only borrow one book per month. This means that if you were to read the first book in the Harry Potter Series in 3 days, you’d have to wait until the next calendar month until you could borrow the second book. Thus, it would take you the better part of 7 months to read through the whole series. The good news is, with all the money you’ve saved, you can buy all sorts of dorky Harry Potter stuff while you’re waiting.

Amazon Knows How to Sell

The more I’m learning about building and selling things on the web, the more I’m impressed with Amazon’s experimentation as well as their recent investment in making their home page look great. Check out this ad for Harry Potter: