I was wondering what good books I could find to borrow from Amazon.com’s Kindle lending library for Prime members. I searched through about a thousand books listed in biography and literary fiction — two of my favorite genres.  I found a half dozen books I’d heard of — a couple, like Water for Elephants, I’d already read. The others were things I might consider reading, but they weren’t at the top of my list. Most of what I looked through? It seemed as if they were written solely for the electronic reader market.

In the biography and memoir section, there were a lot of Civil War, World War II, or American historical titles. A large number are written by the same people and/or company — Charles River Editions, based in Waltham, MA, seemed to write most of the titles about presidents and Civil War figures. I can’t find a website for the company; it’s listed as a printing firm, not a publisher. There were some good reads — Moneyball by Michael Lewis and Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.

In the first 300 selections in the literary fiction section, aside from the aforementioned Sara Gruen book, I found Our Holocaust by Amir Gutfreund, a wonderful piece of Israeli literature I read last year, Booker Prize winning The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, and Trading Up by Candace Bushnell. I could argue that the last of these titles doesn’t belong in the literary fiction category at all. Aside from those mentioned books, I didn’t recognize a title or an author in the selection I viewed, which was about 10 percent of the total in that genre.

Maybe if they had a section for prize winning writing I would find more to interest me without having to wade through a whole bunch of dross.

I am not saying that none of the books on offer through the Kindle lending library have any merit, or even that most of them don’t. But I’m going to spend the limited time I have for reading on books I really want to read, so I choose books from my ever-growing list, based on reviews, recommendations, and past experience with a given author. I haven’t found one of those books in the library.

To me, that doesn’t matter. I am fond of actual books for a lot of reasons, one of which is so that when I die, I can leave a fairly complete library to an underserved community or school — maybe a high school on one of the Indian reservations. I have thousands of titles, and hope to have thousands more before this carbon cage is retired. And even if I chose to put all my money into ebooks, I could afford to purchase what I want to read.

I know the purpose of Amazon.com is to make money for shareholders, and certainly a library of free books to download won’t achieve that. But if the company wants ebooks to move beyond the purview of the well-to-do, it’ll have to offer more known authors, more good literature, more popular titles.

There is another option, too: head down to the local library and borrow Kindle books from there. And if you don’t find a lot of what you want in that venue, consider agitating for more funding for your local library system. Then we can all have access to great reads, whatever form you choose.