AMAZON HAS ANNOUNCED that it is starting a lending library for Kindle owners, letting them borrow one electronic book per month.

The service is only currently available to US customers – it is not yet known when it will be available in Europe.

Borrowers have to subscribe to Amazon’s Prime service, which provides free two-day shipping and streaming movies for $79 (€57) per year.

The books can’t be read on phones, PCs or tablet computers, even though there are Kindle apps for these devices. That restriction is reminiscent of Amazon’s strategy of a few years ago, when the company restricted purchased books to being read on Kindles to drive sales of the e-reader devices.

Amazon says it’s paying publishers for the right to lend the books, usually for a fixed fee. In some cases, it’s paying the wholesale price every time a book is checked out. Amazon says the library has more than 5,000 books, including current bestsellers such as Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” trilogy.

“With this launch, we expect three immediate results: Kindle owners will read even more, publisher revenues will grow, and authors will see larger royalty checks,” Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle content, said in a statement.

Amazon wouldn’t reveal which publishers were on board with the library plan. Among the books it mentioned as being available, only one was from one of the six biggest publishers, a title published in 2000.

Kindle users recently got access to electronic books from public libraries as well. Those can be read in the Kindle apps.