Do you miss signed books…never fear – KindleGraph is here!

Do you remember when your favorite author would do book tours and you stopped into the little bookstore on the corner of your street and get an autograph in their newest books.  Well what if you have an ereader and their new book as an ebook.  Never fear you can still get that coveted autograph.  Evan Johnson, a Former Amazon developer, created a program called KindleGraph and entered it for the $25,000 prize in the national DocuSign Hack-a-thon.  He didn’t win the big prize, he came in second, but many people said thought that he should have won it.  “A 10-year-veteran of Amazon who left the company earlier this year, Jacobs came up with the idea after he wanted to get digital autographs from authors on his own Kindle. He described it as a “fun side-project” according to John Cook.

Their website says, “KindleGraph lets authors send personalized inscriptions and signatures ("KindleGraphs") directly to the electronic reading devices of their fans.”  They currently have over 15,000 books from over 3500 authors and more are signing up daily.

Authors don’t have to pay to have their books featured and even better is that people (you and me) don’t have to pay anything to get their signatures.  KindleGraph is powered by Twitter for authentication purposes, they have their own twitter account you can follow @kindlegraph.  Once you’ve set up a twitter account all you have to do is type a book or authors name into the search engine to see if their available.  If they do you send a request to the author, once they receive the request they fill out their KindleGraph with a personal message or just their name and then it gets automatically sent to your Kindle.  Easy peasy!

“Anyone who is watching can request a KindleGraph and they get it seconds later delivered straight to their Kindle,” said Jacobs. “It makes those author and fan connections much more available.”  If you sign up to get an author’s autograph, don’t expect it to get it delivered to you seconds later. When I’ve requested one it usually takes a few days to get delivered to my Kindle and a lot of times authors will personalize them for you.

Dan Reid commented on John Cook’s write up, “I’ve seen this in action personally, and this is VERY cool.  I was a hardcore “book buyer in hardback” for years, and though I am a total Kindle-nut now (I read on every device you can imagine) I had always missed the signed copies.  This is exactly what I needed.”  I’m with Dan, I love seeing that authors are up on KindleGraph and I can let them know how much I loved their book and would like their autograph.  I personally have over 100 KindleGraphs and when I buy a new book it’s one of the first things I check out.  If they do have one I sign up to get it.

These are two of my personal KindleGraphs.  The first one is from Brenda Pandos for Everblue and the other from Jessica Park for Flat-Out Love.

It is not the same as having an autographed book on your shelf, but it's the closest the digital world has, and I'm loving everyone single one I receive.