Kindle Matchbook (or free/cheap ebook when you buy paper edition)
What is Kindle Matchbook? Announced by Amazon last year, Matchbook is (from LifeHacker) “that will allow owners of hard copies of books to purchase extremely cheap ebook versions for their Kindle collection.” If you bought a paper copy from Amazon you could be eligible to buy or download an eBook edition.
From the link above (make sure you’re logged into your Amazon account) you can click the ‘Find your Kindle MatchBook titles’ button and the website will look through your purchase history and see if any match. Naturally, none of my purchases do – eligibility in MatchBook is determined by the publisher and whether they include their title in the scheme. There is also discrepancy as to whether this is available in the UK or not yet.
However, I logged into my Amazon KDP account (how I manage my Kindle titles) and I noticed that the ‘bookshelf’ now has the option to enrol my ebooks in MatchBook, if a corresponding paper edition is linked to the ebook … which it is for QR Codes in Education:
I’ve enrolled the book in MatchBook so, if you’ve bought the paper edition of QR Codes in Education from Amazon you should now be eligible for the eBook for free. But of course, I haven’t been able to test this … I think I’m going to have to buy my own book to see if this works.
Pricing options for the Kindle alternative edition through MatchBook are limited to either $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free – and the price must be at least 50% of the regular Kindle price (thus a $3.99 priced eBook will only be available, if selected, at $1.99 or less).
- There must be a better way? If you bought the paper copy would you be kind enough to test this for me , see if you can access the eBook edition, for free (and leave a review on Amazon)?
- Reading the small print it seems Kindle MatchBook is only available on orders from Amazon.com, so the rest of the world has to wait a while longer (again) before we can use these tools.
