I received an email from Amazon yesterday about an upcoming change to the Kindle Rewards Beta program, which customers in the US can use to earn points when buying Kindle ebooks that can be redeemed as a credit toward the purchase of future books.
Basically, Amazon is making it easier to redeem points. They’re adding the option to redeem your accumulated points for a credit directly from ebook product pages once you acquire enough points (it takes 300 points to get a $3 credit). Then your credit will be immediately applied to your ebook purchase.
On May 11th, 2025 Amazon will discontinue the original process of redeeming points from the Kindle Rewards Beta page, which can take up to 24 hours to get the credit. The new process is faster so you won’t have to wait for the credit to get applied to your account.
One interesting detail, the email states you have to visit Amazon’s website using a desktop or mobile web browser to redeem the points from Kindle ebook pages; apparently you can’t redeem the credit from a Kindle ereader or Kindle app.
It seems like a lot of the newer Kindle-related features aren’t available on Kindle ereaders, which is odd. Amazon has been doing their Kindle challenges for years now and you still can’t view your progress on a Kindle, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that you can’t redeem points on a Kindle either. I still think they should tie the two things together and reward points for completing challenges.
The redemption process still requires 300 points to get a $3 credit so nothing is changing in that regard. They’re just changing how you can redeem your accumulated reward points, and the change will take effect on May 11th. It doesn’t look like they’re making any changes to the expiration of reward points so you’ll still have to cash them in within three months of acquiring them.
It’s never taken 24 hours for my credit to appear. It’s always been fairly instantaneously.
I’ll stick with my digital credit for choosing the slow delivery option at checkout.
I wish they would better integrate Kindle Rewards on Kindle. Sometimes it will say “this book is worth X points,” sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it says “Price after credits,” sometimes it won’t. I thought I lost my $3 reward but it turns out my Colorsoft was automatically adding the credit to the price of the book without telling me.