Amazon's Kindle Lending Could Nail Nook

In a Friday post to the Kindle community forum on Amazon.com, Amazon's Kindle team indicated that the lending period per Kindle book will be 14 days and the lender can't read the loaned book while it is loaned out. "Additionally," wrote Amazon, "not all e-books will be lendable -- this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending."

Amazon says it will post to the forum when the features become available. No specific time frame is given beyond "later this year."

The "LendMe" feature on Barnes & Noble's year-old Nook was one of Barnes & Noble's key differentiators against Kindle. Using LendMe, Nook users can lend books to one another via Wi-Fi or 3G connection.

At the close of 2009, Forrester Research estimated Amazon as claiming 60 percent of the U.S. e-book market. A year later, the so-called e-book wars have muted thanks to client device attention shifting to iPad and the emerging class of tablet devices, but Amazon and Barnes & Noble remain ultra-competitive as dedicated e-reader suppliers. Amazon launched its next-gen Kindle 3 e-readers in August and confirmed in September that Best Buy would carry Kindle for the first time. Barnes & Noble, for its part, is rumored to be launching an updated version of the Nook at a media event on Tuesday.