Gadgetory

books are still some of the best go to gifts for just about any occasion but chances are your friends or mom or dad are now using an e-reader and you can't exactly put a bow on a digital file I'm Sharon Vaknin and today I'll show you how you can gift an e-book to anyone who prefers eating over paper bag before you do anything find out what kind of ereader the gift recipient has it might be the Nook the Kindle I books for iOS devices or even the Sony Reader get that info first and then pesco if your recipient has a nug you'll need to find out what their email addresses then find the nook book you want to purchase on the barnes a noble website and click buy as gift you'll have to register for an account which is kind of annoying and then you'll fill out a form before completing the purchase what's neat is that you can set a delivery date so you can set it so that your friend receives your gifts on his birthday or other special occasion when they receive the ebook gift they'll have the option to redeem the book or trade it in for a gift card or nook app if they want something else kindle gifting works the same way on amazon.com find the kindle version of the book you want to gift then click the give as gift button over here on the right if you don't have their email address you can choose to email the gift to yourself and then forward it to your recipient or give them a printed version on a real piece of paper which is cool if you want to put it in a greeting card but if you choose to email it to the recipient directly you'll have the option to set a delivery date here at the top if your recipient reads using the iBooks app on their iPhone iPad or iPod touch it's a little trickier you can't gift books from the iBookstore in iTunes because of licensing issues but you can purchase a gift card and add a note to suggest a book title the other option is to buy them a nuke or camel book and suggest they read the book with one of the free iOS apps the other option is to buy them a book from the nook or kindle book stores then use the telephone feature to point them to the appropriate free app they can use to read the book if you don't know which ereading device your recipe you uses but you still want to give them with a book there is one other option Kobo sells millions of ebooks an ePub format which is universal and works with almost any device just head to kobo ebooks calm find the book you want and choose to download it in epub format then you can put it on a thumb drive or email it to the lucky person who gets it so even though paper books are on their way out there are still lots of ways to give gifts to the bookworms in your life if you have any questions about the process send me a tweet and subscribe to my facebook page for more tips like this for cnet.com I'm Sharon Backman