Round up #138: Xfinity, James Bond bargains

Round up #138: Xfinity, James Bond bargains

Big Kindle Daily Deal: 50 “acclaimed” mysteries for $1.99 each

It certainly looks like Amazon wants to drive up the numbers at the end of the year! I wrote yesterday about a Kindle Daily Deal with over 200 books, and today we have fifty mysteries for $1.99 each.

That includes several original James Bond books (which Amazon now publishes). I would start with the first book, Casino Royale, if you haven’t read them yet. There are quite a few other options, though.

As always, check the price before you click the Buy button…it may have expired before you get to it, and it may not apply if you are outside the USA.

The holiday Amazonathon

Amazon has released their always amusing look at holiday sales:

press release

They like to come up with some odd stats. This might have been my favorite this year:

“The cumulative weight of the “Bond 50” Blu-ray sets purchased by Amazon customers this holiday season would be 800 times the weight of Daniel Craig.”

When I think about it, that doesn’t actually sound like that many, but it’s still cool.

Of more interest to us:

• Amazon was ranked #1 in Customer Service by ForeSee for the holidays for the eighth year running. This is actually a significant feat. There’s a lot of fascinating information in this ForeSee report. Barnes & Noble was way down the list, about #25…that’s one of the reasons I recommend the Kindle over the NOOK
• The KFHD was more popular than the Paperwhite…even though it was priced much higher
• The Paperwhite was still one of the top four items…the other two were the Kindle Fire 2nd generation standard definition, and the Mindle (the entry level Kindle)
• I actually gave a sibling the most gifted Kindle book of the season: The Signal and the Noise…I honestly don’t expect my family to be doing the most popular anything most of the time, which says something about the breadth of appeal of this book
• Check out this amazing statement: “23 Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) authors each sold over 250,000 copies of their books in 2012.”  Even though those authors may be selling those books elsewhere, I presume Amazon wouldn’t count those sales. Were there 23 hardbacks this year that sold that many copies? Yes, probably…but this is still a huge achievement for a single channel item
• The three bestselling books during the holiday season at Amazon.com were all in the Fifty Shades of Grey series…how’s that for a self-discovered author? I assume a lot of those were given as gifts, and that seems like an odd choice to me. It seems more like something you would get for yourself. My Significant Other suggested that a lot of people don’t know the content, just that it’s popular. Of course, there’s always been a market for “bind and gag gifts”

To Xfinity…and beyond!

I”ve recently written about an app that lets you watch live TV on your Kindle Fire. One tip on that, by the way…if you are having trouble getting it to open, put your Kindle Fire in portrait mode (taller than it is wide). After you pick a channel, you can switch back to landscape.  Well, quite a while back, I had commented on how Xfinity said they were still working on an app for the Kindle Fire. They have (a free) one now, and I can make this simple. If you are already a Comcast subscriber and you have a Kindle Fire, get it.

XFINITY TV Player

I’m pleasantly surprised with how well it works.

It’s like the On Demand that you already have through your cable box, although that is really slow and clunky when I use it with my TV. You can search by TV Series, by Movies, and by Network. You can download some of them, and you can filter for which ones are downloadable. That means you could throw a few movies on your Kindle Fire before a plane trip and be good to go. It’s got a history feature, and you can bookmark favorites. The image quality was good, and it didn’t take me ten minutes to download an over 500 MB movie (although that will depend on your network, of course).

I tried it in a Starbucks (with the sound off)…no problem.

There was a lot of content! I counted 200 TV series…and that just got me into the beginning of the Gs. Of the TV series, 23 were unlocked and downloadable, 42 were downloadable if you included locked. What does locked mean in this case? It means you would have to be paying for a premium channel.

I definitely think this will be part of the mix for me.

I should mention that the stations did identify themselves at the start of a program, but there weren’t commercials from what I’ve seen.

Oh, and it looks great!

Redeeming a Kindle gift

I thought I’d show you a bit about what happens when you send someone a Kindle gift as a present via e-mail.

They get an e-mail that looks like this:

When they click that “Get your gift now” button, they are taken to Amazon:

They see the book’s regular Amazon product page, but instead of having that Buy now button, they see something like this:

As you can see, they can apply it to whatever Amazon account they want.

If they click that “Learn how this works or exchange for gift credit” link, they see this:

As you can see, quite simple to do.

ILMK in 2012

WordPress did a nice, infographic type report of activity on ILMK in 2012. I made it public, and you can see it here:

http://ilmk.wordpress.com/2012/annual-report/

Thanks to Edward Boynton, Lady Galaxy, Zebras, Roger Knights, and Pam, who are all cited as commenting the most in 2012! Oh, and I like the map where you can see how many visitors came from each country (hover over a country to see).  From A to Z (literally…Australia and Zambia are both represented), I had visitors from 189 countries! That’s almost as many as the UN has (193).

Thanks to everybody for making 2012 a great year, and I look forward to a fun and informative time with you in 2013!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Really last minute gifts: e-books and gift cards

Really last minute gifts: e-books and gift cards

While it still may be possible to get physical goods from Amazon by Tuesday, you don’t really need to worry about that.

With e-books and gift cards, you only need about ten minutes lead time to give a great gift.

Let’s talk about gifting Kindle books first.

The person getting the gift does not have to have a Kindle…they can read the book on a free Kindle reading app.

If they already have that book, they can contact Kindle Support (it’s easy) and get a credit for the amount you paid for the book.

http://www.amazon.com/kindlesupport

Here’s a really key thing: you do not need to know their e-mail address, and you can print out the information about your gift and wrap it for them. What happens is that you select the option to have your gift information sent to you, instead of to them.

When you do, you’ll get an e-mail like this within in about five minutes:

You can then print that out and wrap it, or forward it if you’d rather.

You can also delay when a gift is delivered, but you can only pick a day, not a time, I believe. That would work well on a birthday when you aren’t going to be there, but might not work on an occasion when you are in a group giving gifts (since the person might get the e-mail first.

For more information:

Giving and Receiving Kindle Book Gifts

If you don’t know what book to get, or want to give the person to option to get just about anything they want, you can give an Amazon gift card.

There are so many options!

Amazon.com Gift Cards

This year, I like that you can do animated JibJab gift cards. You can upload your picture (or maybe that of your dog, or whatever you want), and they’ll turn it into a dancing card.

You can do physical cards (they are doing free 1-day shipping on cards that came in a gift box). You can do it digitally, and then you can go as low as fifteen cents (you can even do that with a card you can print at home).

You can buy multi-packs: great for office gifts (these go as low as $10 apiece, and as few as three cards).

You can compare the options here:

Compare Amazon.com Gift Cards

Your recipient applies it to their account, and 1-click draws from a gift card balance before going to the specified payment method (usually a debit/credit card).

Is somebody getting a Kindle? This is a great way to supplement the gift and get them started.

Yes, even up to about ten minutes before you give a gift (which might happen when a new Significant Other or unexpected relative appears), you can do it right. After all, good things are given by those who wait.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.