Give Kindle E-Books As Gifts

 Posted by at 6:16 PM  Tagged with: , ,
Nov 192010
 

Kindle e-books can now be given as gifts

I’ve been waiting for this one for a while: you can now buy Kindle e-books and give them to friends as gifts through Amazon’s Kindle store. The process seems pretty easy:

  1. Choose from 1 of over 750,000 e-books available through Amazon’s Kindle Store
  2. Click the “Give as a Gift” button in the upper right of the screen
  3. Provide your friend’s email address so he/she can collect their gift

What’s cool is that your friend doesn’t even have to have a Kindle — they can download one of the free Kindle Apps (for Mac, PC, iPhone/iPad, Blackberry, or Android) to read their e-book. Presumably, if I know Amazon, they’ll provide all that information in the email sent to the gift recipient.

It seems this option is available for every book in the Kindle store — it’s enabled for all three of my books, and every other one I checked.

One note: the recipient has the option to accept the e-book gift, or apply the amount to an Amazon gift card instead (which they can use on anything available at Amazon.com, which is, well, pretty much anything). This is what would happen if your recipient already owned the e-book you’re trying to give them, for example.

I think lots of people will be getting a Kindle 3 (or the $139 Kindle 3 Wi-Fi) as gifts this holiday season, and even more people will get a few e-books as gifts to get them started. This is a feature that was long overdue.

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