I want to send a kindle as a gift outside the U.S., specifically to the Philippines.
Will the recipient be able to download books there?
If I get a 3G equipped kindle, will they be able to do so remotely?
Is there a way to put non-amazon ebooks onto it?
Thanks for the help guys!
You can check with Amazon, but I also have a Kindle bought in the US but used outside it. Not sure if that’s what you meant, or buying one and having it sent there directly as a gift.
The warranty is international, btw. When one of our Kindles broke, they sent us a new one even though it was out fault it broke and it was bought on the ads-included offer that’s not available in the UK, and they didn’t even ask us to send it back, presumably because the warranty includes Amazon paying for the postage and it’s not worth it for them to pay international postage. They did deactivate the old Kindle, so if it ever started working again it wouldn’t have internet capability.
Wow excellent answer, thanks!
Actually I don’t know if Amazon has a Filipino branch. However, I shop on Amazon.com from Trinidad, using an Antiguan registered credit card and I have no problems so your friend should be able to register for an account on Amazon.com using a Filipino cc. The books you buy on Amazon are automatically downloaded to your kindle when you log in.
The Phillipines seems to offer 3G capability so your friend won’t have any trouble in that regard.
Project Gutenberg has plenty of free books. They will need to be converted to .mobi format for the Kindle to read them properly. As the pp said, that’s simple and easy with one of the many free converters available online. i use Calibre and it works really well. Calibre can also send the files directly to the Kindle once it’s attached to a computer via USB.
Hope that helps!
Yeah - I don’t know what version of Amazon the Phillipines uses. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they used Amazon.com. But my US-bought Kindle will only let me buy books from Amazon.co.uk.
That might be something worth checking out with Amazon - I don’t know if it’s based on email address, physical location or what. BUT, if you registered the new Kindle to your own email address, they’d be able to access all your books too (four Kindle limit last I looked into it, plus phones and computers). They’d also only be able to buy books through your account, so it’d have to be someone you had a lot of mutual trust with, but it could also mean lots of free books for them!
Did you have an account with Amazon.co.uk registered to your email address before you got your Kindle?
Amazon help is very, very helpful. They have a live chat and there is someone there 24 hours a day. I would be hesitant to give anyone access to my Amazon account unless i trusted them implicitly (immediate family).
From wherever? It was my understanding that you couldn’t buy eBooks from B&N, the Apple iBookstore, Google books, or any other non-free source and load them on a Kindle. Isn’t the whole concept of a Kindle “sell the razor cheap and make a bundle on the blades” by locking customers in to Amazon?
Yes, I did, and that’s probably the reason why, true. I also agree with the latter. I just like it so much as an idea if it is feasible. Free books! Legally! Even modern popular ones!
Apparently the converters handle them just fine. I’ve never actually tried it myself - I was thinking more of the various legal free sources and sources which I won’t mention on here. Anyway, if that is a problem, then it’s not unique to Kindles outside the US.
Do you know, is Barnes & Noble available outside the US? It seems not to be from when I’ve tried to use it in the past, but that could maybe be an error on my part.
The concept of the Kindle does seem to be something similar to your analogy, and TBH I’m fine with that given that Amazon are pretty damn good and there are plenty of workarounds.
Thanks so much guys I just got home from getting a Kindle touch (non 3G, didn’t see why mobile downloads were worth 50$ extra?). I just tried amazon.ph and it redirects to amazon.com so I assume it won’t be a big hassle.
Before I was thinking that I prefer all my devices to have physical keyboards, but the touch is a lot sleeker and nicer looking and the touch screen was really nice, so I went with that.
As far as I can tell, all the books at Project Gutenberg are now available in Kindle format (among others), so there’s no conversion needed. You just download the books and transfer them to your Kindle via USB cable—or, alternately, e-mail them to your Kindle, though Amazon will charge you a small amount to do that via 3G.
The same is true for many other sources of e-books. (For example, Baen, which sells SF e-books in addition to offering some for free, has all its e-books available in multiple formats, including Kindle.)
Yeah, you can’t buy from just anywhere. Well, you can, but you might have to do some converting and/or stripping of the DRM, the latter of which is, I believe, technically illegal, though some here at the SDMB have said it’s not that difficult.
I’d go to http://client0.cellmaps.com/viewer.html?cov=1 and check the 3G coverage. From my experience, it’s pretty good - it even works in rural areas in China.
Question 1. Choosing “Philippines” as the shipping option on the Kindle page says they deliver there. From my experience in Australia, this means you can register a Philippine address and credit card, to download things from the Amazon US store. If they said they didn’t ship there, like Singapore, this means 3G will work there, but you need to use VPN or another country’s credit card to buy things from the Amazon store.
I have had no problem loading free books onto my Kindle. I have been enjoying reading old classics that are out of copyright (from Project Gutenberg). As long as the book is in .mobi format, the kindle recognises it as native. Kindle can also read pdf files but keeps the formatting so if the document is formatted for letter sized paper, the text is really really small and even though you can zoom in, it’s a PITA to try to read your document. Much easier to convert the pdf to .mobi.
People in countries which do not have their own Amazon are supposed to buy the books from amazon.com (can’t use amazon.uk), but that’s how I purchased both my Kindle and my first ebooks; there is an amazon.es now so I can use that.
Ebooks can also be downloaded to a computer using other connections and transferred to the Kindle, it’s what I generally do, since amazon isn’t my only source.
I used my Kindle 3G in South Africa all summer (damn thing just about saved my life) and it was fine. It even allowed me to surf the web over 3G, which was awesome because it was my only source of Internet during three months of extreme boredom in a tiny, middle-of-nowhere village. It’s not a great way to surf the net, but any port in a storm. I believe it bought books from the US store because it was registered in the US, and I had to pay some exorbitant fee ($5.00 a week or so) to receive my US magazine subscriptions over 3G.
I use Calibre to convert books from, uh, other sources. It’s amazingly simple to use and works like a charm.
I was recently on vacation in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Brought my Kindle, surfed the web, bought and downloaded books, all no problem. It was a 3G, bought in America, used my American amazon.com account.
Not necessarily true. For one thing, some ebook sites don’t have DRM, and you can download the books in EPUB format (Baen books, for example).
Ereader.com now sells their books non-DRM’ed, I believe - at least, when I got my Nook, I didn’t have to do any tweaking of more recently-purchased books, beyond using Calibre to convert them to epub (and it could also convert them to whatever format the Kindle likes). They’re actually owned by B&N, but annoyingly you can’t read the books on the Nook without converting. And their selection is not great.
And you can theoretically remove the DRM from books bought at B&N. Normally I’d think that B&N wouldn’t want you doing that, but in this case it lets you buy books from them, convert them, and read them on The Other Guy’s hardware. HOWEVER, I tried this once and didn’t have much luck, but didn’t pursue it. I’d like to, as B&N-purchased books tend to disappear from my Nook and need to be re-downloaded.
I was able to do the opposite with Amazon-purchased books, to get them onto my Nook. NOTE: if you do that, obviously do so only for your own use, not to violate copyright laws and illegally share books.
I’m in Australia and I can (and have) bought ebooks from both the US and the UK Amazons.