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After teasing the feature nearly two months ago, Amazon has finally launched its latest effort to keep readers coming back to its Kindle service by allowing customers to purchase e-book versions of past purchases on the cheap.
Amazon announced Tuesday the debut of Kindle MatchBook, a new service that enables past, present or future physical book purchases to qualify for a matching Kindle edition, with prices ranging from free to $2.99.
“Imagine you bought a book from Amazon 18 years ago… and then 18 years later we made it possible for you to add that book to your Kindle library for $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free,” founder and CEO Jeff Bezos asks on the Amazon homepage. “What would you call such a thing?”
If you said “magic,” you’re wrong — but Kindle MatchBook is close to the same thing, assuming you own any one of more than 70,000 books currently enrolled in the service. The best way to describe Kindle MatchBook is a kind of iTunes Match for e-books, which delivers on the same promise Amazon established with compact disc and vinyl sales with its AutoRip MP3 service earlier this year.
Previous physical book purchases can be matched against a customer’s history from the Kindle MatchBook page, although in our case the results came back empty-handed: “We were not able to find any Kindle MatchBook eligible titles based on your past print book purchases.” (To be fair, we don’t buy many print books to begin with.)
In a separate press release, Amazon also announced the release of its Cloud Player Desktop app for Mac, which allows purchases made on the company’s MP3 Store to be played from the desktop, complete with a virtual storefront to shop for additional albums or tracks from the e-tailer.
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