I bought my nephew and wife Kindles this Christmas, and though I put her device on the same account as me so we could share our Kindle library, his got slaved to his own families. Personally, I’d think a 14 year old boy would be better off sharing with his cool uncle than his mom and dad, not to mention the other way around…but…fine. I figured I’d have to by my own copies of zombie teen romance novels.

Of course, if we had Nooks, we could use Barnes and Noble’s lending feature, but the installed base of Kindles attracted me. Which is to say, his mother already had one. Me, I’m platform agnostic, since I read on my iPad, but they can buy their own iPads. Or they can buy mine when the iPad2 is released. But I digress.

The new feature, promised last October, means that you can loan a book to anyone with a Kindle or any device that can run a Kindle app, for 14 days, but only once per lendee. Amazon said it would be released by the end of the year, and they made good a day early…12/30/10.

Sure, it’ s not the same as the public library, who lets you keep it as long as you want…but fines you for the overage. True, most library books are renewable, and not all Kindle titles are available for lending, but all in all I think it’s a terrific boon to readers. Naturally the eBook sellers are hoping you won’t finish in 14 days and be so hooked you’ll have to buy your own copy, but in general that works for me.

I want people to buy eBooks, supporting writers and encouraging people to publish.

Now, you could say that allowing the public library to be replaced by private services is a bad thing, but they reality is that public services are more vulnerable to tax cuts than Amazon. I’ve seen branches budgets cut or just plain closed all too often to think that making services “public” is a guarantee for permanence.