Since Amazon gift certificates now seem to work for buying Kindle books, I went around the house and collected up the jars of loose change that have built up over the past few years, the box with the ersatz state-quarters collection, etc. and schlepped them down to the local supermarket where they have one of those automated CoinStar machines and converted them into a $250 amazon GC, which should cover Kindle stuff for a while
CoinStar normally charges you like 9% if you want cash, but if you're willing to take a gift card or e-certificate for one of a number of retailers then you get 100%. You can do a search on their web site (
www.coinstar.com) for locations of machines that have Amazon GCs as an option.
Z.