Amazon has a growing popularity of their Kindle e-reader and mobile apps. This is likely due to their recent price cut of the device from $259 to $189 (on their smaller model). The company even claims that they sell more Kindle e-books than printed hardcover books. However, the Kindle e-books still sell far less copies than Amazon’s paperback book sales.

Many people prefer Kindle e-books as opposed to larger bulkier versions of hardcover books. This leaves those avid Kindle fans wondering, why can’t you give someone a Kindle e-book as a gift to a fellow Kindle lover?

Amazon doesn’t really address the issue on their Giving Kindle and Kindle Content page either. They only mention that you are able to “use an Amazon Gift Card, Gift Certificate, or Promotional Certificate to purchase Kindle devices, books and accessories.” If someone wants to send a specific e-book for another user, it appears that you are unable to do so, for now. Your only option is to send a gift card or gift certificate and hope they buy what you suggested to them for their Kindle. This makes for an awkward “gift” which people probably won’t be gifting.

Amazon isn’t alone in this limitation of e-books. The iPad’s iBookstore, Sony’s e-book store, and the Barnes & Noble’s Nook all appear to have this same limitation on gifting e-books.

Perhaps these bookstores don’t understand that it might be easier for someone to just e-mail an e-book in .pdf or .mobi format to the person they want to send it to. If people do this, the person gets the book for free and cuts out the middleman anyway, leaving Amazon (and the other stores) not making any money on the gift at all. Maybe this is something that could open their eyes to in the future, but for now, they seem to blindly ignore it.

Installing an e-book onto Kindle or the other devices isn’t hard for many people, but for some it is absolutely out of the question. This is what the retailers want after all, that way the person just buys the book in the proper places and doesn’t download them illegally or get the book for free from a friend.

Amazon is one of the leaders of online retailing though. So, it is quite surprising that they haven’t started reworking their system for Kindle to make gifting e-books available. Perhaps in the future, but for now, it is unavailable.