Since it’s inception nearly three years ago, Grey Gecko has prided itself on our innovative choice to give away the ebook version of our titles with any print edition purchase. It’s one of those really cool little extras that we like to throw in for our customers, and we believe it’s helped to solidify our place in the industry as a publisher who actually cares about readers.

We’ve seen a few small presses or imprints with similar programs for some of their books, but we’ve never seen another company that does it for all print editions. Until now, we’ve been at the forefront of this wave of electronic bonuses. It looks as though our idea has spread, however, as the big gorilla in the room has now adopted a similar stance on ebooks.

Recently, Amazon has been promoting their new Kindle Matchbook program.

Introducing Kindle MatchBook
For thousands of qualifying books, your past, present, and future print-edition purchases now allow you to buy the Kindle edition for $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free.

This program allows any publisher to provide free or discounted Kindle versions to anyone who purchases a print edition from Amazon. Since we’ve long done this very thing, we’re super-excited to have Amazon take over the distribution of the ebooks for us. And now, our customers can utilize their Kindle ebooks like any others that they’ve purchased directly from the big A, including WhisperSync between devices and other nifty features.

This is a great program, and we heartily approve – and more importantly, all our print books are included in this program. Plus, it’s not just for new purchases – it’s retroactive. So if you’ve ever bought a print edition of one of our books from Amazon, click this link and then the big yellow button that says “Find Your Kindle Matchbook Titles” to start downloading your free Kindle ebook versions.

Meanwhile, we’re going to keep grinning to ourselves that we thought of it first. We hope you don’t mind.