HMV are no longer accepting gift cards. I have (had!) £29 worth of credit for HMV. This is........ not good.

Regarding gift vouchers.

One growing area is the multi-brand voucher. You can get One4All gift vouchers from the Post Office and these are accepted in quite a few stores, even online as they also act as a prepaid credit card.

As for book sellers, I don't think Waterstones is in too good a position, they need to close some branches as they often have more than one in towns where they bought up other companies like Dillons, Blackwells and Ottakers.

As for eBooks, I had a very pleasant surprise when browsing the Kindle store at the weekend. I found a book I've been searching for ages.

It was a Stephen King book that he published in 2004 through Hard Case crime, it was only a limited print run, and has never been published since. I borrowed a copy from my local library that has a subscription with Hard Case, but my wife returned it by accident before I'd finished it. Worse still the next person he borrowed it never returned it, so I couldn't borrow it again to finish it, and I couldn't buy it retail, and all copies online were upwards of £50 each.

Anyway, at the weekend I see it's now available for Kindle at £3.84, so I snapped it up...

I've never understood the 'Gift tokens' racket - why would anyone want to give a present that restricts the recipient?

I have always found that a nice card with cash/cheque inside fulfils exactly the same purpose without the 'tie-in'.

Unfortunately we always end up with a collection of tokens after Xmas (what do you give a couple who already have everything, I suppose!!) - and now we have the worry of which ones might become worthless!!

I agree with fourm member, it will be interesting to see what effects might be seen next year - maybe people will come round to my way of thinking?

On the non-honouring of gift vouchers:

Five Live was talking about it last night and a financial expert proclaimed that the voucher holders were non-secured creditors, which is why they won't get anything back.

There was also the feeling that although the sales of them were still made until the eleventh hour so as not to announce to the world an imminent company collapse, and that technically it is fraudulent trading as the directors knew they would not be honoured. The excuse offered by the directors would be that they believed that they were still going to save the company up until the appointment of administrators, and therefore were not trading fraudulently (well, they would say that, wouldn't they).

It seems to me that a change in the law is required so that in future any credit voucher holders do get a full refund on account of the fact that they fall into this grey area of maximum risk that is to the great benefit to all the other secured creditors that have no further risk. They should by default in law become a secured creditor in cases of companies going into administration.

Or as fm pointed out, the collapse of the entire credit voucher business will follow shortly.