We received a new comment on Misha’s article about how and why to gift an e-book today. It relates to gifting ebooks at Amazon outside the US.
Does anyone know if this is a problem? For example, suppose you live in the UK and wish to gift a Kindle ebook to a friend who also lives in the UK. What’s the best solution?
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chrismcmullen 
I’m in the Uk. I’ve found that Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk don’t cross over. We seem to have some tight rules here. I can’t use a .com gift card, or be gifted a book from a .com account. A friend recently gifted me a code for an audio book but the code would not work for me (.com to .co.uk) I believe the system works to some European countries but from what I’ve read a while ago on some forums the Uk has some different rules on publishing. It would be great to have it concisely confirmed. I enjoy reviewing books and it has been an issue for some authors who want to send me their book.
So, if I understand correctly, someone in the UK can gift an ebook to someone else in the UK, where both use the .co.uk site? But gifting from .com to .co.uk or vice-versa is the issue. Is this right?
So what if I live in the US and want to gift an ebook to someone in the UK. Can I not do it? Or can I create an account at .co.uk and do it from there?
Thank you for sharing your experience. That’s very helpful. 🙂
I’m afraid we don’t even have the option to gift books on Amazon.co.uk, but I found an article explaining how we can create a personalised gift certificate of the book we would like to gift within Amazon.co.uk and send this to the person http://echoebooks.com/blog/160-giving-a-kindle-ebook-as-a-gift#.UmKX7qtwaM8
As to creating a .co.uk account if you are from America, I don’t know if they allow that, it might be worth a try?
Thank you for the link and helpful info. 🙂
Thanks so much for the link Rosie – that’s very helpful! 🙂
I’m not sure about the UK but I live in Lebanon and that posed a problem. I tried to buy e-books from several websites but failed due to copyright issues. Buying a book online for me is a major problem since the shipping usually costs me more that the book itself. I have sent several complaints about this and only recently received a reply from Barnes and Nobel explaining the reason they don’t sell e-books to people from this region (copyright issues).
Thank you for sharing your experience with this. 🙂 That’s a great point that copyright issues may be a factor in this.
It seems like in your case, you can’t buy the e-book or receive it as a gift. In the case where the recipient could buy the book him- or herself, at Amazon UK, for example, it doesn’t seem like copyright issues should prevent gifting, but maybe it factors into this somehow.
Here’s a little insight into trying to use a gift certificate across the Amazon sites, so I assume it will mean the same with gifting book;
All the various Amazon. (whatever) sites are independent as far as gift certificates go. They all use different methods of collecting payment not to mention the various exchange rates as well. This policy may eventually change but for now, any Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.ca; Amazon.de; Amazon.fr; Amazon.jp; or Amazon.com purchased gift cards are only going to be able to be redeemed on their respective sites.
Hope it helps.
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