"We're making this functionality available in time for the holidays to offer an easy, stress free holiday shopping option for anyone -- not just Kindle owners," says Russ Grandinetti, vice president, Amazon Kindle.
The "Give as a Gift" option means that Amazon shoppers can choose from one of the more than 750,000 available books in the U.S. Kindle Store. Gift recipients have the option of reading the Kindle book on any one of the company's free reading apps for Mac, PC, iOS devices, BlackBerry and Android mobile phones.
The clear point of the new program is to push device-independent e-book sales this holiday season. Freeing shoppers from the worry of having to determine whether their friend or family member is already a Kindle owner could do wonders for Kindle Store sales.