Just in time for the holiday season, the Pottermore e-book shop has added gifting options for Harry Potter e-books and audiobooks. The gift e-books or audiobooks can be bought any time from up to six months in advance through the day on which they should be delivered. The books may be downloaded up to eight times each. All Pottermore e-books are multiformat and DRM-free. Pottermore has also just made the tie-in story collection The Tales of Beedle the Bard available as an e-book for the first time, for £3.99 in the U.K. and $5.99 in the U.S., with a...

CNet’s Sharon Vaknin has a 3-minute video (embedded below) in which she covers some ways of giving e-books as gifts. While the process is pretty simple overall, it is interesting to see Vaknin present video of how it works. Giving e-books as gifts with the Kindle or Nook is as easy as clicking on “Give As Gift” on the Kindle or B&N listing for the book. Both sites offer a time-delay feature in which you can choose a calendar date to have the e-book delivered. iBooks doesn’t permit e-book gifting, however, so all you can really do is send...

PaidContent writes about a holiday campaign launched by digital publisher Open Road Integrated Media. Called “The Gift of E”, the campaign centers on giving e-books for Christmas as an alternative to shopping in crowded stores. The site feature instructional videos on how to give e-books as presents. After Christmas, the campaign will focus on e-book “starter packs” for new e-reader owners. As PaidContent points out, only Kindle and Kobo so far have set up a way that individual e-books can be given as gifts; other e-tailers will allow buying gift certificates but not specific titles. That could give them...

CNET has a 3-minute video that bills itself as a “Buyer’s Guide” for tablets and e-readers, though it primarily focuses on tablets, and mostly the more expensive tablets—the iPad, the Galaxy S, and Sony’s Android tablet (which I hadn’t heard of before). It paints this trio of $499 tablets as the main attraction for buyers this holiday season, then spends a little time discussing the Amazon Kindle and Kindle Fire as alternatives. In the video, CNET’s Donald Bell refers to the Kindle Fire as a “good enough product”—essentially a device that will work well as an e-reader and...

From Reddit comes the heartwarming story of a 27-year-old man whose 13-year-old brother saved his allowance all year to chip in (with other members of the family) toward buying him a Kindle for Christmas. The 13-year-old is the only child of the family who still lives with his parents, and since his father suffered congestive heart failure and has to remain bedridden most of the time, the boy has to do most of the work around the house. The family has gone through financial hard time since then, due to medical bills. Money has obviously been...

USA Today has an article pointing out that e-book readers make gifts because even the “single-purpose” ones like the Kindle or Nook can be used for more than just reading e-books. It mentions keeping track of recipes by using Calibre to reformat clipped text into e-book formats and syncing it to your device; using the built-in web to access calendar, Wikipedia, and other information sources; and playing games. This is pretty obvious to us, but perhaps people who don’t pay as much attention to e-book readers don’t realize what is possible with them. Of course, less-dedicated devices such as...

The New York Times suggests that this is going to be the “tipping point” holiday season for e-book readers. Though Kindles have been hot Christmas gifts over the last couple of years, this is the first season that e-readers are going to be widely available for under $150 (and indeed, under $100 in some cases). This means, in turn, that a lot more e-books are going to be sold to read on those e-readers. The NYT article has figures from various sources suggesting that over ten million e-book readers will be in circulation by the end of the year,...