I may have broken Amazon

I'm loving my new Kindle, and frankly, I need something to cheer me up given the rough nights we're having these days with Anne.

So yesterday, I took some time to pluck out a few titles that I'd like to read, and place them on my shopping list for future purchase. Then I noticed that when you have a Kindle, you can get a short sample of the book for free, to decide whether or not you like it. I got excited. Free is right in my budget right now. :) Thus, I downloaded a few samples.

Then, I started to justify a small purchase to myself. I have plenty of traditional books that are as yet unread on my shelves at home, but I *really* wanted to experiment with reading something on the Kindle. I had the samples, but I wanted more.

I'm avoiding secular books for Lent, so I browsed my wish list of Catholic titles. Eureka! Book 3 in the John Paul II High series. I've blogged about earlier installments in this series before. It's a young adult series that is really well done and I've loved both books that I've read. Books 3 and 4 and newly out and I'm itching to read them. For the Kindle, they are only $5 each.

Ha ha! Maybe I'll just download book 3. It's Catholic fiction, so it qualifies under my lenten reading plan. And I've been dying to read it. I'll just click "purchase"...

Uh oh. Amazon, in her infinite wisdom, is telling me that "due to copyright restrictions, this title is not available in your area: United States." Oh, this is bad. What about the next book in the Fairy Tales Retold series, which I'm going to blog about tomorrow or Friday (excellent young adult Catholic fiction from Chesterton Press)? Same message.

I started to panic. I went through my list of desired titles, including all the old Harlequin romances that I have queued up, plus the NASCAR books. All of them were listed as "unavailable in my area."

For an embarrassingly long period of time, I was convinced that my not-exactly-mainstream reading choices (Catholic fiction and Harlequin Treasury titles, combined with racing romances, *snorts*) were simply unavailable for me to read on Kindle. How many other people read these things? Maybe they'll never be available for Kindle!! Since I had just registered my Kindle the night before, I thought to myself:

"Now it knows where I am, since my new Kindle is registered to me, and so now all of this information about what is and is not available in my home area is coming out!"

I mean, seriously. Who is "it"? The Mysterious Amazon People Behind the Curtain? That makes no sense. I'm at the *U.S* Amazon store, it's not exactly rocket science that people from the U.S. are going to be buying those books. And they were all listed with a price as available before yesterday afternoon.

I forced myself to squelch my panic-induced paranoia and went back to the listings for the sample that I'd downloaded just that morning, for one of the modern Fairy Tale Novels. Same message. I released a little of my tension, since I knew that that was impossible. The sample was currently on my Kindle, no problem.

I went into the Kindle Forums, and saw a thread with lots of confused Amazon customers. Apparently every single person currently living in the United States could not at that moment download anything from the Kindle Store.

Dear me. This wasn't the fault of me and John Paul II High, was it? Had I broken something and screwed the entire country? Well, nobody knows, but they were all blaming Harry Potter. All these years after those books came out, and yesterday was the very first day that all 7 Harry Potter books were available for download onto Kindle. Previously, the author has resisted having them converted into ebook format. And speculation was that maybe it was all those Harry Potter fans that broke Amazon.

But at any rate, an hour later, when I went to leave for home, Amazon was still broken. Sometime over the evening, they fixed it, since everything is put to rights again over there. But still. Panic abounded. We all couldn't get our instant gratification of having a book we desired in our hot little hands within a single minute of ordering it. Travesty!

We are all so incredibly spoiled. :)