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Today the world's biggest bookseller is opening up shop as a lending library. That's right, Amazon is getting into the book lending business, albeit on a very small scale. This is good for Kindle owners, and a sign that Amazon is going to go to the mat to ensure that it puts a Kindle in as many hands as possible.

The company is announcing the Kindle Owner's Lending Library, which will feature thousands of books that Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership can download. This comes in addition to the Prime library of more than 13,000 movies and TV shows.

Scott Berkun is giving away his latest title Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds through November 3rd.

All he wants in return? Your email address. More specifically, Berkun asks that folks sign up for his monthly mailing list. And you can unsubscribe if you don't like what he's sending, so there's little risk involved.

Amazon's Kindle Team announced on Friday that it plans to make lending for Kindle available "soon." The feature will allow you to loan your Kindle books to other Kindle devices or Kindle app users for a two-week period. This announcement brings to the Kindle one of the key features touted by the Barnes & Noble Nook: the ability to loan out your eBooks.

But there are restrictions, of course.

Yesterday we gave you 5 reasons why you should read your next book on an eReader device. Needless to say, many paper book fans protested in the comments. And with good reason. Paper books have many things going for them and it's still early in the evolution of eBooks.

This is a technology blog. However, in order to highlight how far eBooks have to go until they seriously challenge for the hearts and minds of book lovers, we present here a list of reasons why paper books are still better than eBooks. We'll also speculate about how eBooks might match each feature that paper books currently have over them.

Recently I began to buy eBooks for the Kindle application on my iPad. While I still love paper books, the digital wiles of eBooks are looking increasingly attractive to me. Below are five eBook features that may tempt you to buy electronic books too.

I should note that I wasn't a hold-out on eBooks for moral reasons. I simply couldn't access them until recently. Amazon's Kindle, Sony's Reader and Barnes & Noble's Nook have all been either unavailable to people outside the US, or the eBook stores to populate them have been inaccessible. However with the Kindle for iPad, I've finally been able to enjoy the forbidden fruit of eBooks.

You could write a novel in binary, but it's hard enough getting people to pay attention to your words in plain English. Futurists and programmers like Paul Graham, Eric S. Raymond and Ray Kurzweil may be prolific thinkers, but if they hadn't bothered to write down their ideas, many of us would have never found them. All of us have stories to tell, and Fast Pencil offers us a chance to format and publish them.

The increasing usage of BitTorrent services has been a living nightmare for big industry publishers. The RIAA is one of the most notable opponents of BitTorrent sites due to most users using the service to pirate music among other things. Some of these opponents fail to see the upside to using BitTorrent technology as a great marketing tool. However, a Program Director at the University of Seattle has chosen to use BitTorrent to generate buzz and spread his latest eBook to the masses.