Amazon’s Giving Away a Free Kindle!


I’m having a lot of fun with Amazon’s “A-Z Sweepstakes”. Every week they’re giving away a new prize, “in celebration of the many ways ‘Amazon Prime’ members take advantage of free two-day shipping on millions of items…” But I’m also enjoying the comments that people are leaving as they see Amazon’s prizes.

Amazon will be giving away their prizes in alphabetical order over eight weeks, so in the first week, the prize was a Motorola Android tablet computer, with Amazon explaining that “A is for Android.” Now we’re up to the K’s — and of course, “K is for Kindle.” The lucky prize-winner will receive a new Kindle 3G with its own leather cover with a built-in light– plus a $50 Amazon gift card!

“How wonderful it would be to win this!” wrote one woman in Tennessee. ” Would definitely make up for my crappy Mother’s Day….”

To enter the contest, just point your web browser to Facebook.com/Amazon (and then click on the Sweepstakes link). Amazon’s form asks for your e-mail address, name, and phone number (“to inform winners”), and there’s still a lot of prizes left to win. For the first week of June, the prize is an $800 digital Nikon camera (“P” for photography), and the next week the prize is an X-Box 360 game console. (“V” for video games). And in the last week — starting June 13th — Amazon’s actually giving away a $1,000 Amazon gift certificate “for your choice of the ‘zillions’ of things you can find at Amazon.com.”

But this contest is fun for another reason. Amazon has been asking questions related to their prize, so this week’s question was related to the Kindle. “What would you read first on your Kindle?” Amazon asked on the contest’s web page — and over a 500 different people posted their answers.

Stephen King stuff
American Psycho
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The directions for the Kindle
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
A Dance with Dragons
Gone With the Wind
Alice in Wonderland

The answers kept rolling in, with hundreds of reading enthusiasts sharing the title of their next book. (And on another page, Amazon simply asked users to name their favorite books.) There were a variety of answers — and over 500 more comments — ranging from “”The Bible” to “Harry Potter”. And one user even said their next book would be The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway “because I’m headed to the festival San Fermin in Pamplona to run with the bulls!”

But this was my favorite response of all. One reader announced that if they won Amazon’s prize this week, “I’d give this Kindle to my sister so I could read the 600> books on my Kindle in peace!”