Amazon Kindle Matchbook is live

Can I just say how much I love the title of this service? Not only does it fit in with the theme of the idea of &quot;Kindling&quot;, it also can be separated into Match and Book, which is what the service does. With so many absolutely awful names for services and products out there, it&#x27;s nice to see one that (in my opinion) is well thought out.<p>As for the service, I really love the idea. This is the logical step, and pretty much exactly what I was looking for in both owning the book in a physical format and also having access to a digital version for different reasons. It is just really disappointing that a total of 0 of the books I have bought from them are available through this service, and I&#x27;ve used Amazon quite a bit. Hopefully, it&#x27;s successful enough to take off and start to force more support from publishers, and it doesn&#x27;t die out too early due to lack of publisher support.

I have many hundreds of books purchased from amazon, going back to 1996. It took about ten seconds for the site to identify five that were eligible. Four of the five eligible books were purchased between 1997-2002 and the eligible recent book was a work of fiction that doesn&#x27;t appear to have aged well. Books published in the last decade appear to be a harder sell for the program.

For all of those debbie downers in the comments: this is a pilot program for many of the publishers (who are obstinate and allergic to innovation); as more people buy the kindle versions of books they&#x27;ve purchased the more open publishers will be to this idea and give Amazon more leeway. I&#x27;m honestly surprised Amazon was even able to pull this off.

I have a more positive data point: I&#x27;ve purchased about 175 paper books on Amazon, and 23 are part of the Matchbook program. That feels decent to me.<p>Going through my order history also made me realize how successful the Kindle is in extracting money from me. I had 175 book purchases between February 2000 and October 2010 (when I got my first Kindle), and 375 purchases between October 2010 and October 2013. I went from buying 17 books per year to buying 125 books per year.

I have 24 books eligible for the program, which seems like a high number based on the comments here.<p>I&#x27;ve probably ordered 600-700 books since 1999.<p>Most of the Matchbook matches are at the $2.99 price point. None are listed for free. Most are fiction. Most are from my 1999-2004 purchases.<p>Incidentally, four (out of six) books from my first Amazon order were eligible.<p>I suspect (hope) that more publishers sign up in the near future.

Easily dozens and likely hundreds of books bought over the years.<p>A single book came up on matchbook. A cookbook.<p>Things that seem too good to be true usually are.

I like they are trying to shake things up here. I don&#x27;t buy books anymore because it&#x27;s no longer useful to have a shelf dedicated to books I will never read again but I appreciate that there a ton of people who are weary about the digital medium who may need coaxing - this is a perfect segue into the Kindle for Amazon. Huge step towards adoption once they get more publishers on board.<p>As a side note I love how 80% of the comments here are about the number of books available as a pissing contest versus any real discussion for the merits of the idea. For shame.

US only it seems. Unless none of my purchases through the UK site are eligible.

If you&#x27;ve already purchased a hardcopy, why does a softcopy cost anything?

My available books are primarily Neal Stephenson and Terry Pratchett.<p>Interesting that they count Amazon &quot;Bargain Books&quot; as purchases. These are generally remaindered hardcovers.

Looks like anyone publishing remotely technical topics didn&#x27;t buy into the program. I&#x27;ve been a prime member since the beginning and during the first few years I was probably buying 2 or more books per week.<p>9 matches for me, only one that I&#x27;d want to have a digital copy of for reference and all offered at a discount as they were already very inexpensive on kindle. None free.<p>Disappointing. Still love that Amazon is trying to push this, but looks like adoption will be slow.

I didn&#x27;t have any that came up... too bad.<p>To be fair, it is the first day. Looking through the selection of matched books that are available, it looks somewhat similar to the titles that were in the Kindle lending library when it first started. Admittedly, the library is still pretty sparse but they have built it up over time.<p>I&#x27;d expect the titles to increase more quickly than the in the library. Once they see how it starts to work, they&#x27;ll probably jump on board. Afterall, this is a pretty attractive value proposition from the perspective of the publishers. Kindle Matchbook brings incremental sales that would have probably never occurred without this program and have very little marginal cost (Amazon&#x27;s cut being the only thing that comes to mind).

They need to go back to publishers and rework this. Only 5 books and I&#x27;ve been buying from them since the beginning.<p>I bought one of them, if it helps give them some leverage.

I still don&#x27;t understand how an e-book, which can infinitely be replicated at no cost to anyone, can cost $10. How on earth does this make sense? I purchased A People&#x27;s History of The United States a few years ago, and now I can buy it for my Kindle for $10? Who does this?<p>Occasionally Amazon will offer the Kindle price higher than the used physical copy price.

I think Amazon Matchbook is a brillant idea. I love using my kindle when I am out and about, but prefer the paper format when home. I also enjoy the feeling of having a hard copy, that nobody can claim back, or put DRM on.<p>When matchbook will become a reality (ie. more editors will join the program, and more recents books will be added), I will happily use it.

Current Matchbook offer seems quite humble. Publishers will be naturally reluctant to sell their $22 books for $2 but I hope they&#x27;ll understand very soon that this isn&#x27;t actually a discounted sale. It&#x27;s either extracting more money from past sales or making future sales more likely to happen (and also extracting more money from them).

I thought I recalled that match was going to be free?<p>Even so, of all the books I&#x27;ve purchased, they&#x27;ve only found matches for 2, which is very disappointing.<p>Would like to see more titles available so going forward, I know whether I should go back to buying paperbacks&#x2F;hardcovers or keep buying for the Kindle.

I have dozens (over a hundred?) purchased books on amazon over the last decade. 3 matching books, one of which is the Odyssey. It&#x27;s an awesome idea, but it doesn&#x27;t seem to include much yet.<p>Most of the &quot;new and popular&quot; books seem to be pulp romance series that are already free in the prime lending library.

Got one match, and it was for $3, which as far as I&#x27;m concerned is basically full price.<p>Not really, full price for the Kindle version was $9, but ebook prices are pretty much a) free, b) less than $1, c) $1 &lt; x &lt; $10, or d) more. I don&#x27;t find the difference between 3 and 9 to be significant in this case.

I await the day when this works between the trifecta of print, ebook, and audiobooks. At least this is one step closer.

I&#x27;d really like to see Amazon figure out a way to handle the purchase of books as gifts with the Matchbook program. Books I bought for someone else, how can they get the Matchbook Kindle version. Also, books I&#x27;ve received as gifts from others, how can I get the Matchbook version?

&quot;For thousands of qualifying books, your past, present, and future print-edition purchases now allows you to buy the Kindle edition for $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free.&quot;<p>There is a verb agreement error lurking in there.<p>s&#x2F;allows&#x2F;allow&#x2F;

Gee, I am so shocked that the publishers, who just settled an antitrust case whose goal was to raise e-book prices in opposition to Amazon, are not opting in to a program from that same Amazon which allows people to purchase books for less money.

I have around 40 books purchased via amazon, and they are mostly programming&#x2F;woodworking. No matching results via matchbook for me.<p>I do have to wonder if their selection available for matching includes many non-fiction titles.

What about the other way round? The argument for ebooks costing the same as a paperback is that we are paying primarily for the content not the physical form, so shouldn&#x27;t this work in both directions?

I have many, many books in my purchase history, but only 8 - so far - are MatchBook-eligible. OTOH, one of them is Cryptonomicon, purchased in May 1999, so, hey.

Why not put an expiration date on the digital books while they&#x27;re at it so that they can possibly charge you 3 times (or more) for the same book.

&lt;3 Amazon and this service, but out of dozens of purchased paper books, it only shows 4 as eligible. What&#x27;s up with that?

I clicked expecting to see a really tiny version of the Kindle :)