eBooks as Presents.

I'm not a rich person. I'm not on the breadline, you understand, but one finds oneself becoming habitually cautious with money, and any holiday NOT a cheapo camping trip to France is regarded with suspicion because it could be expensive.


My boyfriend, however, is not badly off. Obviously this is GREAT, as long as I don't mind being labelled a gold-digger, so most of the time I try to pay my way as best I can.


However, it becomes a problem when trying to buy presents. Like my father, my boyfriend is well enough off to be able to buy pretty much what he fancies, although he might balk at a Ferrari. From my point of view, this means that choosing presents is a serious challenge, resulting in a pair of slippers one year, and a leather shooting licence holder the next. And with the best will in the world these are mega-boring presents!


So this year, in time for his birthday, I decided that since he'd spoken of the Kindle client on his Android device, I would go to Amazon.co.uk and choose a good book. I'd have had an actual book delivered, except that I gather the postal service in Canada can be a bit slow. Definitely a good case for an e-book or two. Since I can't afford to spend a expensively, I need to spend imaginatively!


I'd noticed that some of the kids in school have started to read George RR Martin's book, A Game of Thrones. I suspect this may have something to do with the recent HBO series, but whatever the reason, I decided this was the book, and so I bimbled over to Amazon, and found the book. Yes, it's available as an ebook, and it's not that expensive, either - bonus! Unfortunately the Buy as Gift button has disappeared. I was sure that I remembered, from last year when trying to buy my brother a magazine subscription for his Kindle, that one could buy a book as a gift, but not a magazine sub. While I'd found this odd at the time, I bought him a gift certificate instead, telling him what I'd thought I might get for him. OK - I know you can buy ebooks as gifts in the US, so I pottered over to the US site - yes! There it is! 


Except that I get the message "We're sorry, we could not complete your gift purchase because your Kindle account is registered to Amazon.co.uk. Only Kindle accounts registered to Amazon.com are currently eligible to purchase Kindle Book gifts." when I try to add the ebook to my order!


All answers provided by Amazon staff go along the lines of "Buy a gift certificate - then they can choose exactly what they like!"


Right - I'll just go and buy my rich boyfriend a cheepass £5 gift certificate so he can go ahead and choose a book he wants. Yeah, right. So much for using my imagination and coming up with a REALLY nice present.


You know what? I'm not a bad person. I want to be able to purchase e-content. I adore that my LoveFilm subscription allows me to stream movies. I hate that it's not all the movies, but the choice isn't so bad, and at least it's increasing daily. I love that I can buy MP3 albums from various places, and I do so! I'm a regular purchaser from Fictionwise, and they don't care where I put my content. In fact, had Fictionwise had the book in question, I'd have bought it from there, and found a way to deliver it to the birthday boy. As it happens, in the end I had to sign up for an account on a site called hive.co.uk, and bought the book in epub format. The site sent me confirmation emails with download links which I promptly forwarded to the birthday boy, who was able to download the books to his device.


Here's the deal, though, Amazon. You're going to have to fix this present giving thing. I can't be the only person (and going by the fact that the aforementioned answer is in the FAQ, or Frequently Asked Questions, I'm not) who wants to buy eContent as a gift. Sure, if you've got the money, a gift certificate is a brilliant way to go. This is about on the same level as our grandmothers giving us M&S clothes back in the day. Remember we'd just take them straight back to the store, get our money back and promptly spend it all on sweets or junk magazines?


And it's not just eBooks, you know. What about buying an MP3 album for someone? A game? A movie?

Books and eBooks

There are many reasons I love eBooks. One of the biggest of those is that during my recent move, I didn't lose a single one of them. Neither did they end up stored in a damp shed, curling up at the edges. Nope, they stayed firmly on my device, and as anyone who knows me well will be aware, the first things set up in any new home are computers, internet and gadgets. Without these the house is not a home.

The recent addition to the devices, an eeePad (not an iPad, dear me no!) running Android, has access to a slew of applications (free and otherwise), and so within the first week or two I found Android versions of a few of my favourite apps, including one for FBReader, an ebook reader I rather like. I won't go into the other apps I bought, except to recommend Cut The Rope!

But one afternoon, sitting and drinking tea with my mum, she mentioned to me a book I might enjoy, Broadmoor Revealed, an historic account of the famous mental hospital. Since Broadmoor is rather close (you can hear the alarm tests from where we live, every Monday morning), I did, indeed, think it a book worth my time, and on finding that it was free, I hastened to download the Kindle reader app, and then the book itself. The book arrived in double quick time - after all, it's delivered wirelessly, I don't have to wait for the post, and I set about reading it.

And then I got thinking - I wonder what other books may be available for free. Which is a slippery slope if ever there was one! I was hooked. I went through their Top 100 free books, many of which I already own, being such items as Sherlock Holmes books, or Jane Austen books. But there were enough modern ones to keep me interested. More were downloaded.

At which point it all starts to turn pearshaped.

I started to look at the other books. You know, the ones which aren't free. Let's just say that it's waaaay too easy to purchase books now. One click, and it's in my library. ONE CLICK!!!

Now we come to the dilemma.

I want to purchase a book about the VLE I'm testing (that's Virtual Learning Environment), and the paper copy is priced at £24, while the Kindle version is priced at £14! That's a pretty big discount. But if I buy the book, it's attached solely to my device. I can't leave it with the school when I go.

And the question of the day - should I buy it and expense it, knowing I'll be keeping it if I ever leave? After all, I'll be saving them £10, and anyway, it'll be obsolete before long, won't it?

Toddlers and Sharks

I glanced across a copy of The Times this morning, idly turning the pages as I perused, looking for juicy tidbits of information. And so it was that I stumbled upon the article entitled, "Nanny state makes a meal of child food advice with 80-page guide."

I'd link to the page, but it's one of the articles requiring signing up and paying for the online copy, which I have yet to do, but suffice it to say that the article gently rebukes the apparent u-turn performed by David Cameron for his stance on "The Nanny State". Apparently the 80-page guide even goes into the correct size of plastic plates from which you should feed your toddler, and provides an actual-size diagram of said plate, along with pictures of the perfect plate. As if this isn't risible enough, the sentence "The guide also reminds us not to feed shark to toddlers" has to be the icing and cherry on top of this delicious cake!

After all, I doubt there's a mum in Britain who hasn't pondered, as she decides what to feed her hungry family, on the suitability of shark meat for the evening meal.

"Honey," I can imagine her calling. "What would you like for supper? There's beans on toast, spaghetti bolognaise, or shark terriyaki."

Either that, or it's a typo, and was meant to read, "The guide also reminds us not to feed toddlers to sharks."