Amazon announced a brand-new value-added feature for its consumers in its new Kindle Matchbook program. Under this new structure, readers can have a low-cost shook edition of any book they have already purchased in print, dating back to 1995. There are already over 10,000 titles approved by their publishers for inclusion in Matchbook, some going back as far as eighteen years ago.
“If you logged onto your CompuServe account during the Clinton administration and bought a book like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus from Amazon, Kindle MatchBook now makes it possible for that purchase—18 years later—to be added to your Kindle library at a very low cost,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content. “In addition to being a great new benefit for customers, this is an easy choice for publishers and authors who will now be able to earn more from each book they publish.”
Authors who self-published their titles through Amazon’s CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing platforms also have the option as the rights’ holders of their works to include their titles in Matchbook simply by logging into their KDP dashboards and enrolling their content.
This program is something that digital publishing proponents have clamored for since the current state of ebook sales. The ability to bundle content in this way has been experimented with, but this is the first full-scale model of making any title available at the publishers’ discretion.
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.