Round up #223: Deliver to Cloud, Kindle giveaways

Round up #223: Deliver to Cloud, Kindle giveaways

The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later.

Win a Kindle (not from me)

Sure, there are going to be some great Kindle deals in the next ten days or so (what with Black Friday and Cyber Monday). I’ll inform you about some of those, I’m sure (and we have some sense of what some of them might be).

Wouldn’t it be nice, though, to win a Kindle?

I figured there might be many people giving away Kindles right now…and a quick Google search reveals that to be the case.

I want to stress , here, that I do not know if these are legitimate, and I am not associated with them. However, my intuition is that most of them are (my advice to you is that if you don’t feel something is safe, skip it). After all, a Kindle is not that expensive to give away, and it can be life-changing. Kindles give you access to books…many world classics for free, for one thing.

They are also seen as a cool gadget…how often is it that “intellectual” and “cool” go together? 😉 Well, maybe more now than it was a few decades ago, but still…

Note that some of these may end soon! Many of the ones I found through Google had already ended.

• Rafflecopter: Kindle Fire HDX, Kindle Fire, $50 Amazon gift card (Facebook entry)
• The Herald Bulletin: Kindle Fire
• First Class Novels: 7″ Kindle Fire HD (so, last year’s model?)
• Brickstone Publishing (Kindle Fire HDX)
• Amelie Howard: Kindle Fire HDX, Kindle Fire, $50 Amazon Gift Card

Hm…I wonder if the first one and the last one are the same?

It’s interesting to me: it appears that Rafflecopter and ContestBurner are sites which help people do giveaways…and there seem to be many authors/publishers involved.

AmazonLocal: Select Kindle books for $0.99 each

Here’s an AmazonLocal deal:

Select Kindle books for $0.99 each

This is the typical AmazonLocal thing: you go there, and get a free voucher. If you don’t have an AmazonLocal account, you’ll need to establish one…but that’s free, too. 🙂

Then, you apply it…and you can get up to twenty out of a select group of Kindle books for ninety-nine cents each.

There is a Zane Gray, a Max Allan Collins, and Settlers of Catan available. The last one was a popular boardgame, and this is a well-reviewed novel based on it.

Earn Amazon Coins

A reader pointed out a promotion to me in a private comment.

I had noticed it, but as my reader pointed out, it isn’t very obvious how it works.

Part of it seems to just be a Special Offer (it’s accessible through the Offers tab on my Kindle Fire HDX). That’s 250 Amazon Coins when you buy certain apps.

What are Amazon Coins?

It’s Amazon’s own currency, used for apps and in-app purchases.

I have to say, though, that it won’t surprise me if Amazon expands this to other items in the next year or so. Why not? I’m sure Amazon would love to become currency, in addition to everything else it does. 😉

Right now, a coin is equal to a penny: you can spend 499 Amazon Coins to get a $4.99 game, for example.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

That’s 250 Amazon Coins on top of other coins…which you also earn when you buy one of these apps.

Even if you don’t have Special Offers, you can get to 2,214 apps (at time of writing) where you earn coins by purchasing them:

Earn Amazon Coins

Note: it will tell you at the top of the page how many Amazon coins you will earn. When I sorted by price low to high, I found some free games, but they did not say that you would earn any coins (despite being in this category). My guess is that whether you can earn coins or not comes and goes, and they just don’t get out of the category as soon as you stop being able to earn them.

Here’s an example:

Real Steel (based on the Hugh Jackman movie)

You pay $0.99 for it, and you get 30 Amazon coins. You can think of that as spending a net $0.69 for it, if you want.

The best reviewed app in this group?

Relax Melodies Premium: A White Noise Ambience For Sleep, Meditation & Yoga
4.7 stars out of five; 1,255 reviews at time of writing

It’s $2.99, and you earn ninety Amazon Coins.

Deliver to Cloud Only app option

One of the things people have wanted for years for Kindle e-books was to be able to “buy” them without having them delivered to a specific device. They’d like them to go just to the “Cloud”, their online storage at Amazon, so they can download them when they want them.

Well, Amazon recently added a “Cloud only” option when purchasing…but it is for apps.

That actually may seem like a step backwards to some people, although some will appreciate it.

By default, now, the app will deliver to a device…if you don’t want it to do that, you have to switch it in the dropdown to go to “Cloud Only” (this is when shopping on your computer).

I do that constantly.

Apps take up a lot of memory, and I’m very often getting the Free App of the Day (FAotD), and don’t want it on any of the devices at that point. I typically have e-books delivered to our Cloud Reader if I don’t want to use them right away…but delivering them to “Cloud Only” would probably be clearer.

Two glitches?

I’ve been having trouble using the Goodreads on Kindle that came as part of the most recent updates to both the Kindle Fire HDX and the Kindle Paperwhite 2 (I have both).

On the KFHDX, it won’t load my Amazon books (so I can add them to Goodreads) at all, most of the time. I’ve checked with Amazon (starting with Mayday, then getting transferred) and with Goodreads.

Goodreads eventually said that it was a bug, although there was also heavy server traffic due to all the new people getting into Goodreads through Goodreads on Kindle.

On the Paperwhite, it sometimes lets me add a few, and then stops.

I do have a lot of books (thousands), and I suppose that might lower my success rate. If it is working fine for you, or if you’ve experienced this, I’d be interested to hear it. My guess is that, if they added the functionality to the Goodreads website, I could do it there.

The other thing, and I think this is unrelated, is that I find I need to restart a lot (more than once a day) to connect to wireless. Well, not actually to connect: it continues to show I am connected. Just to be able to anything on it.

I have recently changed my router, but that doesn’t appear to be it, because the same thing happens on other networks.

The mid-November update did add a lot of connection capability, and I’m wondering if there might have been some security added which is kicking me out…like port security at some businesses.

It’s difficult, and I’m hoping it gets fixed.

Again, I’m curious as to whether you have noticed this as well.

If you do have thoughts on any of these stories for me and/or my readers, feel free to comment on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy  Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.