Just to point out something: you can only email books to a Kindle from an email address you have approved in your Amazon account, so you can't spam people with e-books (not easily, anyway).

One thing that could work is to provide a form where a person could enter the email address he wanted to mail to, and give the person the option (unchecked by default) to remember the email address in a cookie so he doesn't have to fill it in each time.  That way the email address would be tied to the computer used, and there would be no need to create a database of users.

James Simmons

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 5:18 AM, Marcello Perathoner <marcello@perathoner.de> wrote:
On 10/30/2012 01:33 AM, Greg Newby wrote:

We haven't emailed books before, but I
agree it might be desirable.  I can think of some details
that matter (i.e., preventing emailing books to strangers;
books that are too big for email).

That would be very hard to do in a secure way.

We'd have to check each person's email to avoid people spamming other people's Kindles with big files or with unappropriate content.

We'd have to implement a full fledged user system, with email address, password and email confirmation. This is confidential data and quite impossible to keep secret on a system like ibiblio, where all web servers run as user nobody.

Furthermore Amazon could easily block that if they wanted because our IP adress would be known. They probably have a big spam filter already that would block us anyway.

And it would be a wrong political signal. Why should a volunteer organization work hard to make a the crappy devices of a multi-billion company user-friendly? After all it is not PG being user-unfriendly but Amazon. Our politics should be to make people complain to Amazon.


The solution is quite easy: Ask Amazon to implement a function in Silk that lets user save books to the "Books" tab. Make lots of people ask.




Regards

--
Marcello Perathoner
webmaster@gutenberg.org

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