It's free and I don't have to store it

Today's post on the Amazon Kindle's Blog lets us know that the first book in the Pendragon Series is now available for free.

This is a book that has been recommended to me as being about the same quality as the first Harry Potter book. I've read the first 2 in that series while sitting on the beach (but won't be reading any more until they're available for the kindle) so this looks like a book I might want to read next time I'll be on a beach.

Which will be in December.

If this was a physical book, I would pass on the offer. Yes it's free, but I'd have to store the book for 7 months, and then feel guilty if I didn't attempt to find a book drop after I finished.

But now we're talking Kindlenomics (see that's Kindle-economics, I'm pithy).

I can buy the book now for free and it will download to my kindle. But I hate having a huge pile of books on my kindle (yes I know it can hold 50 billion books, leave me and my neuroses to restricting it to one page). So, after it downloads, I'll just delete it.

Then 7 months from now, when I'm loading up the kindle for my well deserved beach vacation, I'll download Pendragon again. Since I bought it today, I can read it whenever without having to store it.

To put it simply - I can buy every free book Amazon offers, and read them whenever I want without having to deal with storing them myself. This revelation caused me to go back and purchase every free sci-fi book Amazon is promoting regardless of whether I think I'll read it or not. (Thanks to Amazon's contextless promotions, I have no idea why these books are free, but thanks anyway!)

Giving customers the ability to time shift purchase promotions will certainly make it more difficult to analyze the promotion's performance.

I'm not sure this is a fail for anyone in particular, but it is an interesting facet of how Kindlenomics is different from regular book promotions.