You Can Now Gift Anyone With An E-mail Address A Kindle Book
With the holiday shopping season in full swing, retailers are clamoring to publicize their sales, deals and more. Amazon issued a release today that customers can now give any of the 725,000 Kindle books to anyone with an email address.
Context & Ripple Effects
The gifting feature caps a busy month in which Amazon has been assembling what analysts describe as a true vertical publishing business: it launched Amazon Studios on November 18, shipped a Kindle Publishing pipeline for periodicals on November 8, and had already opened Kindle publishing to all blogs back in May 2009.
Retail mechanics are following the content build-out. A year ago Amazon's stock rose after Reuters reported Kindle was boosting overall e-book sales; putting all 725,000 Kindle titles into the gift economy just as holiday shopping begins is the logical next step for turning the catalog into a mainstream purchase.
First-order effects
- Holiday shoppers can now buy any Kindle book as a last-minute gift delivered straight to an email address, removing the need to know which device or store a recipient uses.
- Amazon's own release frames this squarely against the holiday season, so the immediate beneficiary is Amazon's Q4 digital media revenue per gift transaction.
Second-order effects
- Email delivery sidesteps hardware as a prerequisite for buying an ebook, pushing Amazon's catalog toward readers who don't yet own a Kindle and giving Amazon a new funnel for future device sales.
- Rival ebook stores face pressure to match gifting or concede the holiday gift market to Amazon's larger catalog, since a gift locked to one store's ecosystem also locks in the recipient's future purchases.
Third-order effects
- If gifting normalizes ebooks as presents, digital storefronts start competing on social and retail features — wrapping, cards, physical gift-card tie-ins — rather than price alone, deepening the lock-in each ecosystem builds around its catalog.
- Combined with the November publishing-tool releases, gifting points toward Amazon controlling the full loop — publisher tools, store, and now the gift transaction — in ways traditional book retailers cannot replicate.
The trend: Ebook retailing is maturing into full functional parity with physical bookselling — gifting included — while the platform that owns the publishing tools, the store, and the devices captures an ever-larger share of the transaction.