Borrow Kindle Books for Free With New Lending Club

If you own a Kindle and are looking to gain some literary karma and free books, the Kindle Lending Club is the place to start.

The new site, which launched in public beta on Friday, allows a Kindle e-book to be loaned once for up to two weeks -- a service that Amazon.com just started offering in late December 2010 to compete with a practice already in place with the Barnes and Noble Nook.

I wrote a story for WalletPop on Jan. 6 about how to save money on e-books, including loaning them for two weeks through individual owners. But at the time there wasn't a clearinghouse for finding books to borrow. You had to know another Kindle or Nook user.