Last year’s blog post explained how to give Universalis apps as presents to your friends. Now it is turn of e-books, for your friends with e-readers.

Giving the ability to make e-books

In general, you make a Universalis e-book by creating it for yourself. You buy a registration code, and either you use the Universalis program on Mac or Windows to make yourself an e-book or, for  Kindle e-books only, you can use our web site to send an e-book directly to the Kindle. In either case, you need a Universalis registration code, which costs £19.99.

So as a once-and-for-all present to your friend, you can buy a registration code as a gift. To give a code as a gift, please buy it from us in the usual way. Forward the 9-digit code to your friend, and then, to avoid confusion in the future, send us an email to let us know that the code belongs not to you but to your friend (your friend’s name, address, and email would be helpful).

Pre-packaged e-books

We have built a few pre-packaged e-books, which make perfect Christmas gifts. They are:

• Liturgy of the Hours 2015 (High Seasons) – for England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. This gives every Hour for every day from now until Pentecost 2015.
• Liturgy of the Hours 2015 (High Seasons) – for the United States.
• Liturgy of the Hours 2015 (High Seasons) – for Australia.
• Mass Readings 2015 – for England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. This gives the readings at Mass for every day from Advent until the end of 2015.

The links shown above will take you to the relevant Kindle Store listing.

For the Kindle only, in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales only, there is an alternative, because we sell two pre-packaged e-books which make perfect Christmas gifts. There is the Liturgy of the Hours 2014 (High Seasons), which gives every Hour for every day from now until Pentecost 2014, and there is Mass Readings 2014, which gives the readings at Mass for every day from now until the end of 2014. Both of them cost £6.17 and you can view them on Amazon by clicking on their titles above.

The snag is that, except in the USA, Amazon don’t allow you to give e-books as gifts. They do, however, offer various kinds of gift cards, so you can give one of the right value and hint to your friend what you would like to him to buy with it. You might send him the links to the e-books, to help.

In the USA, you can give e-books as gifts.

Making e-books yourself

There is nothing, technically, to stop you making an e-book for (say) 2015 and giving it to your friend. But please note that you shouldn’t do this just like that, because when you bought your registration code it gave you the right to create e-books for your personal use only. It isn’t fair to us or to the copyright holders to go round the place pirating!

Here is what one of our customers has done. She has a friend who is an elderly priest, and she has set up his Kindle for him. In setting it up, she has noted the Kindle’s @kindle.com email address (every Kindle has one) and now, whenever it is time for a new e-book, she sits at home and sends the new e-book to that address by email, and Amazon deliver it wirelessly to her friend’s Kindle.

The procedure is the same as if she were creating Kindle e-books for herself (the instructions are here), but instead of saving the e-book to her Kindle she saves it to her desktop and then emails it from there. She makes one-year e-books, and sends them just before Christmas as a sort of extra Christmas card.

Being upright and decent, our customer has bought a registration code for her friend. We know about this because she asked us whether to switch registration codes from her own to her friend’s before creating his e-book and then back again to her own afterwards. I said no, no need at all: the aim was for the right number of licences to exist, corresponding to the number of users. Flipping the codes the whole time wouldn’t benefit anyone: it would just be pedantic.