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?