Now the catch. The books are uniformly two dollars more than they would cost if you are in the US. This is ostensibly to pay for the cost of international wireless tie-ups.
You also find free books more than ocassionally. The easiest way to find free books is to monitor watch the Kindle bestseller lists. The free ones quickly rise on the bestseller lists. Be aware that the books can be free for short periods of time and then become paid. The book Treason by Don Brown (Yes, that's Don Brown not Dan Brown) was free (I have a receipt to prove it). But now it is priced at $8.79.The catch for us in India? You will never see these books as free. Towards the middle of November if you were from India, these books used to show up as $0. When you went to the product page the price jumped to $2 (the international tax so to speak). Yours truly, caught up in the excitement of netting a free book, jumped at the chance. I eagerly clicked through to the next page and then clicked on Buy with 1 click. What I didn't realise was that between the search and the product page the price had jumped from 0 to $2. So, I got billed for this amount. When the receipt landed in my inbox a minute later I realised what had happened.
Strictly speaking this was the perfect case of caveat emptor (latin: Buyer beware). The uncharitable might even call it bait and switch. Promptly I wrote into Amazon support and complained. Fantastic customer support. They promptly reversed the charge and guess what? Over the weekend (this incident happened on Friday night IST) they fixed the search. So the price on the search showed what you saw on the product page. The product management team is simply amazing (hats off guys).
So is there a work around? Yes. If you have a US address you can put on file, use that. Once your country is set as the US, you will immediately get access to free books which you can download to your computer and then transfer over the USB.
As easy as Apple Pie
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