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Amazon Prime Free Ebook Details Leaked on Amazon.com

Here’s something to occupy your attention until the Amazon event next week.

One industrious Kindle fan was digging through the source code of various Amazon webpages when he found something rather interesting. There’s code hidden on the "Manage Your Kindle" page that suggests that Amazon are now tracking which Kindles can be used with something called "Prime_Ebooks". Gee, I wonder what that could mean?

Snarkyness aside, this is probably closely related to a story from a couple weeks back. The WSJ reported that Amazon had tried to negotiate some type of subscription plan with publishers, but they didn’t go for it.

At the time, everyone pretty much assumed that the ebooks would be free with an Amazon Prime membership.  It would work similar to the free streaming video that Amazon offer now. As you can see from the code above, Amazon are clearly planning ahead.

There’s also code later in the page that (should Amazon ever offer this service) will be part of a menu. There are 2 menu options named, and they mention returning and deleting these ebooks. They would work much the same as the library ebook options work right now and in fact they say exactly the same thing.

All in all, this is an interesting confirmation of that older story but it’s not actually new.

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Comments


fjtorres September 25, 2011 um 10:23 am

You know, buried in that image is one bit of fairly big news. 🙂

Right above the entry for Prime ebooks is an entry for "pdoc archival" set to "no".
Implied is that the system can recognize devices with a property of "yes".

Whispersync does not currently allow sync’ing user sideloaded content across devices nor does it archive it for you. But Amazon’s music service does both, for music. Add in that a lot of people use Calibre, Dropbox, and other systems to feed "personal docs" to Kindles over the net and the idea of Amazon offering to host and sync personal files for your Kindle account sounds like a big plus, no?

I’m thinking that wednesday, Amazon is going to announce Cloud Drive for Kindle.

Nate Hoffelder September 25, 2011 um 11:00 am

Shhh. I was saving that for Tuesday.

fjtorres September 25, 2011 um 11:39 am

Whoops!
Me and my big mouth. 🙂

I’m thinking Prime ebooks may not be dead.
Maybe the BPHs ran the numbers and realized it was a net money maker for them…

Yeah. Right, like that could happen.


Kindle Cloud Storage Coming with the Kindle Tablet on Wednesday? – The Digital Reader September 25, 2011 um 5:54 pm

[…] I posted about some new code that was found on one of Amazon’s webpages. An industrious Kindle fan had noticed that there […]


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