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Comment by worldvoyageur | Hacker News Reader

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't appear to have aged well. Books published in the last decade appear to be a harder sell for the program.

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"We were not able to find any Kindle MatchBook eligible titles based on your past print book purchases. See more Kindle MatchBook titles here." -- I bought $4k worth of books in last 18 months.

Edit: I bought a Kindle anyway. They look awesome and there is a $60 off deal going on.

Same here, it's odd because some books (which I was expecting to find under this promotion) fall in any of these categories:

a) A digital version is already distributed for free at the author's page (not that it makes any difference).

b) A digital version is not even purchasable, but you can find it by illegal means (seriously? I can download the torrent but not purchase the ebook??? This doesn't even make sense!).

c) A digital version is only available at Amazon.

Some of those torrents are OCR scanned copies.

I was talking about PDFs that look exactly or really similar to the printed book... (which probably are a leaked prerelease).

I had 19 books matched (also out of hundreds of physical books, purchased only up until Kindle emerged), and picked up most of them. The prices were almost always $2.99.

>update: The more we support this program the more publishers will buy into it. They have just received new dollars from me that are generally 20% bonuses above the cover prices of books sold years ago. There is no cannibalisation as I'm not in the market to buy any of those books again. I really want to get to the stage where all my books are digitised and I can choose whether for not to maintain a physical library. If Amazon and publishers provide a simple and legal way to do this then sobeit.

I have no books eligible, what a disappointment. I really hope they can eventually expand the program to every book out there.

Yep zero books eligible here and I buy books obsessively from Amazon. Weird.

I doubt they will expand it to every book. It might be a while before it expands to a sizable portion of their library.

Netflix wasn't what it is on it's first day.

Even today I'm disappointed with Nexflix's selection so I never bothered getting past the free trials.

I would hope that some day Amazon would require everyone that wants to sell a physical copy join in on the program but I can see how that might damage their profits. Maybe once a majority of books are on the program they can make it a requirement and everyone selling books will have to decide to suck it up and join or not make money through Amazon.

What I really don't understand is why anyone selling books wouldn't want to join the program. Is there any scenario at all where they would lose by being a part of it?

I have a similar Amazon history as yours it seems, but both books it found eligible for me were very new (2009 and 2011 publication dates).

Same here. 202 books, going back to 1998. Only 5 are eligible. :(

My single match is from '07, Optimal Thinking.

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