( CNN ) -- This holiday season , many people received e-book readers as gifts -- but what about the books ? It has been surprisingly difficult to give someone an e-book as a gift . You could buy them a gift card for the e-book service of their choice , and maybe suggest which book to purchase , but you could n't actually purchase it for them . In November , Amazon changed that . You can now buy a Kindle book as a gift . Recently I tested this by purchasing a holiday gift for a friend . She reported that obtaining my gift was easy -- she got an e-mail notification of the gift , clicked a link in the e-mail , clicked a link on the Amazon site to accept the gift , and then was able to download the book to her Kindle . This process also works for people who use the free Kindle smartphone or tablet apps , rather than the Kindle device . However if someone you know uses one of the other popular brand-name e-readers , they 're probably out of luck for direct e-book gifting . So far , you can not give a Barnes & Noble NookBook directly as a gift . Nor can you give an iBook , or a Sony e-book . You can , of course , buy or obtain e-books in other formats -- there are many : plain text , HTML , PDF , MobiPocket , ePub , and more . But you 'd need to check first whether your recipient would be able to use these book formats , and that would probably ruin the surprise . As a Kindle user who has many friends who also use the Kindle , I 'm glad that Amazon finally began offering this option . Obviously it can be done , and the experiences can be user-friendly for the buyer and recipient . But I 'm surprised Apple , Barnes & Noble and Sony have n't followed Amazon 's lead on this . They 're just leaving money on the table -- and in the current tight economy , what retailer can afford to do that ? The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Amy Gahran .
Amazon changed its policy to allow customers to give e-books as gifts . But you can not directly give a NookBook , an iBook or a Sony e-book as a gift . You have to go through the company that makes them and get permission from their staff.