Giving Kindle books to non-US recipients

Wanted to share another technology ‘success.’ I’ve long wanted to be able to give legal eBooks to friends in Indonesia who don’t have credit card accounts, but DRM technologies and limited copyright domains make this difficult. I tried various avenues (e.g., Google Play and Adobe Digital Editions-DRM ePubs, etc) but failed to find a simple solution. I hadn’t tried Amazon Kindle, because I knew the recipient needed their own account, and had heard that a credit card was needed to open an account. Well, I just observed a US friend, who had just received a gift of a Kindle book, open an account and receive a book, and all he needed to enter was his US address, not a CC number. So, encouraged, I explored this route.

Thus, one could attempt the following. It might work, or it might not ;-)

• Buy the book as a gift in one’s own Amazon account and send the purchase code to oneself.
• Create an account at Amazon.com, using the name of the recipient, and one’s own email address (the recipient can change that address to their own at a later stage).
• Find a way to masquerade as having a US IP. There are many solutions to this. I find the simplest is to ssh into a US-based server, setting up a SOCKS socket on a user-level local port (e.g., ssh -D 8000 user@us-server.com), and connect your browser to it (e.g., chromium --proxy-server="socks://localhost:8000"). This stage is needed because Amazon prevents users (of all nationalities) in Indonesia (and no doubt most other countries) from accepting a book (or only the first?) while their browser has a non-US IP.
• In the masquerading browser, go to https://www.amazon.com/acceptgift and enter the ‘Gift Claim Code.’ One will then be taken to a form in which to fill in an address. I assume this needs to be a US address. To use a real address of a US friend would be more ‘honest’ than making one up. Nowhere is one asked to lie about one’s nationality.
• The gift book is accepted and added to the Kindle library.
• Finally send the username (email address) and password to one’s friend, inviting them to change the email address. They can then get a Kindle reading app (for free) for their phone of laptop, and can download the book that they now legally own. [EDIT 2014-08-20: Hmm. Seems that non-US users can’t get a Kindle app from their local GooglePlay store. However, Android apps can theoretically be direct installed (as .apk packages); see here, or Google “Kindle apk.”]

This method, should it be tried, would not circumvent DRM in any way. The book was paid for by the giver, and is now ‘owned’ by the recipient (i.e., within the DRM-jail of Amazon). There are no doubt some complexities of international copyright that are circumvented by the above, but these have never seemed to me to be of much moral value, at least compared to the importance of getting people in developing countries connected legally (i.e., respecting DRM) with the world of eBooks.

---