You have probably heard about the Amazon Kindle, the new device that allows you to instantly download a “book” and read it on a lightweight device that looks like a small pad of paper.

If you have never heard of it, pop on over to Amazon and search for Kindle. Although I’ll bet you find a link as soon as you arrive there.

The idea is that you can download any of the over 200, 000 books that have been prepared for viewing on the Kindle. The catch? Each book is $9.99. This is a little more than some paperbacks, and a little less than others. And like any book purchase, it’s yours after you have bought it.

The downside to all of this is that you have to shell out well over $300.00 to buy the Kindle. The upside is that if you are going on a trip, you only have to take the Kindle and its charger, not the pile of books that you would normally take.

Go to Amazon to learn more, as this is not a review of the Kindle. Rather, it is an expose of a way that I just learned about that will save you hundreds of dollars if you are a reader.

Who knew that the National Association of Realtors® has a free lending library of ebooks, audiobooks, and videos? I certainly didn’t.

Here is how it works. You go to http://ebooks.realtor.org to begin. From that page you can learn about the process of selecting, downloading and reading books. Since it is a library service, you don’t buy the books, you get them free. Like any library, you can only have the books for a definite period of time. Once the time is up, the books “expire” and can no longer be read. That solves the problem of getting books at the library and then having to return them. In order to “borrow” a book, NAR wants you to have your NRDS number handy so they know that you are a member.

Many of the books that I have already purchased for the long flights between here and London and back home again were available for download on Realtor.org.
If I had only known!

As it turns out, your local library probably has a similar system in place for checking out books. To get those books, you just need a library card from your library. To learn more about the process of using your local library (and NAR’s library) go to this website walk through of the process: http://www.overdrive.com/products/dlr/tour/default.asp

So, if you add up the cost of a Kindle, and $9.99 a book times however many books you read in a year, you can save a pile of money.

One other thing, I looked at over 20 pages of titles at Realtor.org. Only 1 book was checked out and unavailable to me (Of course it was the “one” I wanted!). That tells me that this service is vastly underutilized and the chances of you finding and borrowing the book that you want are excellent.

See you at the “library”!