WITH YOUR NOOK TABLET, you can borrow books from friends and lend them books, and also borrow books from your local library. In fact, in some ways it’s even easier to share books with the NOOK Tablet than with printed books, because you don’t need to physically hand off or collect a book. All it takes is a few taps on your NOOK Tablet.
But how to do it? Which books can and can’t you lend? How long can you borrow and lend them for? Read on; this chapter has all you need to know.
You have two ways to lend and borrow books with your NOOK Tablet: Using the NOOK Tablet’s LendMe features to borrow and lend books with your NOOK Friends, or borrowing books from the library.
Keep in mind that you can’t lend out every book you own, or borrow every book your friends own. The same holds true with library books: You can borrow books that the library assigns for borrowing.
Borrowing and lending may strike you as an odd concept when it comes to NOOK books, because there’s no physical object to hand over or take in. In fact, though, an eBook is a physical object of sorts, even though it’s made up of bits and bytes rather than paper and print.
When you buy a book using your NOOK, you’re downloading an eBook, but that eBook is very different from a physical book on one important way: eBooks are protected with DRM (see the tip in Tip), while physical books aren’t.
DRM essentially links a book to your use on the NOOK Tablet, or any NOOK reader, such as one for a PC, smartphone, or tablet. So you can’t simply lend any NOOK book to anyone, or borrow any NOOK book from anyone. The book has to be coded to let it be lent, and not all books have this coding embedded in them.
Why is that coding necessary? Without it, any eBook could literally be given free of charge to millions of people, by someone simply posting it on the Internet, and other people downloading it. If all books were available for free like this, publishers couldn’t stay in business, and authors couldn’t make a living (including yours truly).
Bottom line: There are certain restrictions and rules about which books can be lent, how they can be lent, and for how long.
With that background out of the way, it’s time to take a look at how to borrow and lend books, first from your local library, and then between friends.