New at Unglue.it: Buy as a Gift

Have you ever tried giving someone an ebook as a gift? DRM makes it difficult to give a Kindle ebook or an iBooks ebook as a gift. The recipient is locked into one vendor’s ecosystem, so unless you know the recipients reading platform, you might pick the wrong flavor of ebook. Printed books, by contrast, can make great gifts. When somebody gives you a book, the fact of the gift makes it even more valuable than a book you’ve bought yourself. How many books have you read and loved because someone gave it to you?

When we thought about implementing gifts on Unglue.it, we realized that “Buy-to-Unglue” ebooks could make great gifts.

They work on any reader
They don’t need expedited shipping, so if you’re a last-minute shopper…
We personalize each ebook, so we can put a gift message inside every ebook
Best of all, each purchase gets the ebook closer to being free for everybody!

There were a few wrinkles to work out; but there’s still time to use it for the holiday season. Here’s how it works:

You need to be logged in as an unglue.it user.
When you buy one of these ebooks as a gift, you enter the email address of the recipient, along with a gift message.
The recipient is sent an email containing a redemption link. When they click on the link, they get access to the book’s download page. They can set a password if they want to collect the ebook later.
When the recipient redeems the gift, the giver is sent a confirmation
In case the email gets lost, the giver is also sent the redemption link.
In case the recipient already has the ebook at unglue.it, they can re-gift it to some one else!

For now we’ve enabled “Buy as a Gift” for our five “Buy-to-Unglue” books, and we’ve started to think about how this could work for our “Thanks-for-Ungluing” books.