Get your eBook of Other People’s Heroes signed!

One of the few real arguments against eBooks left for me is that you can’t get an eBook autographed as a collectible or keepsake. I don’t have an awful lot of autographed books, but I know some autograph hounds that would be upset to lose this potential source of enjoyment, and may even avoid eBooks entirely because of that. But it seems now that somebody has found a way to get around this.

Earlier, thanks to a post by my friend, colleague, and fellow author Andrea Speed, I learned about Kindlegraph.com. At Kindlegraph, you can request an electronic “autograph” from over 800 authors on over 4000 eBooks. The author will get an e-mail and you’ll get the autograph — along with a short personalization — as a PDF file. You can have it sent directly to your Kindle (which may incur Amazon’s e-mail charge, which was 10 cents last time I looked), or you can have it sent to your e-mail address for free, then load it up to your Kindle (or any other device that displays PDFs) yourself. In fact, you don’t even need an e-reader to take advantage of this service. As you can see here, I’ve got an autograph from one of my favorite eBook authors to display.

The only catch is that — at least currently — you can only sign in via a Twitter account, which means if you don’t have a Twitter account, you can’t get Kindlegraphs. Hopefully, the developer is looking at other ways to get these to people — if nothing else, adding Facebook connectivity would expand the potential audience enormously.

It’s kind of a silly idea, admittedly, but it’s kind of cool as well. It’s a fun way to give your eBooks a little added meaning. There aren’t any big name authors signed up for the service (at least, not yet — I’m lookin’ at you, Stephen King!) but the number of books and authors available on the service is going up very quickly. I’ve added both Other People’s Heroes and A Long November to the catalog of available titles. If you own either of these — hell, even if you’ve got OPH in print — and you’d like an “autograph,” just click in and make the request!