Amazon offer E-Book gifting

Amazon are going to give holiday shoppers the option of giving digitial books to recipents for download. With their rival Kobo set to do the same thing, it was a preemptive move on their part.

Amazon.com are hoping to help boost their end of year sales by offering ebooks as gifts. On friday they added this gifting option for all their members. The procedure is straightforward. Find the book you want to give, tag it is ‘give as a gift' and then add the recipents email address and the shopping is complete. Amazon then handle the rest and send a message to the person letting them know that they have a gift ready to claim.

Books can be given as gifts even if the recipent doesn't have a Kindle, because many devices can read the literature, as long as the Kindle application is installed. The Apple devices all have a Kindle Reader, as do the Blackberry and Google Android smartphones. If you don't have any of these, then the application can be installed on a Windows or OSX computer.

“We're making this functionality available in time for the holidays to offer an easy, stress-free holiday shopping option for anyone — not just Kindle owners,” Russ Grandinetti, VP of Amazon Kindle.

It seems a rather late addition to their store, especially with sales of electronic books already outperforming printed copies. Amazon released information stating that in the last thirty days, digital books have surpassed those of hardcover and paperback books combined for the top 1,000 bestsellers on the store.

KitGuru says: 2011 should be an even stronger year for digital book sales as many people realise how impressive these devices are.

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