Update: someone has volunteered to borrow the book. Thanks, everyone.

I wonder if there are any Kindle owners who have Prime Memberships at Amazon.com out there willing to do me a favor?

Amazon.com has started up a lending library system through its Kindle device. It’s only open to people with Prime Memberships (which previously only provided expedited shipping) but they will allow you to borrow books one at a time.

For me, I’ve decided to enroll one of my short stories in the program for the usual reason: money. Amazon says they’ve created a half-million dollar kitty to be shared among all the authors whose work is borrowed each month, which each “borrow” equalling a single “share” of the overall money.

It’s a clever idea. They’re crowd-sourcing their lending program to people like me (and here I am blogging about it) for a set amount of money. What’s more, if the system is seriously underutilized they could probably fudge the data however they like. Who would know?

Anyway, I wonder if someone eligible for the program would be willing to borrow my short story The Bone Orchid? It’s an original story set in the city of Pald, a setting I’ve written about before.

I’m curious to see how big the shares are and what sort of buy-in they have. Amazon isn’t famous for sharing numbers, but I’d like to see how this comes out. And of course I’ll blog about it.

Thanks.