THOUSANDS of Britons are trying to make video games work on their new Kindles after refusing to accept that the device is a type of book.

Amazon’s Kindle e-reader was an inexplicably popular Christmas gift in the largely illiterate UK, with most recipients convinced it must be a games console.

Father-of-two Tom Logan, from Swindon, said: “My reaction on unwrapping it was ‘cool, an early 90s Gameboy’. I was bang up for a bit of old school Mario Land.

“I realised there was something very wrong when I pressed a button that took me to a shop selling ‘books’.”

He added: “I vaguely remember ‘books’ from school. They’re little rectangular things, you open them up and there’s shitloads of words in a row. Gays carry them around as a signal to other gays that they want sex.

“Certainly a book isn’t something I would ever want. Nor would I want one, electronic or otherwise, near my kids.”

Kindle recipient Stephen Malley, 28, said: “I rang up Amazon and told them it doesn’t do games and they just acted like they already knew and it wasn’t even a problem.

“There isn’t even an app that makes the screen look like it’s lager, and when you tip it it’s like you’re drinking the lager. You know what I mean, it’s funny as fuck.”

He added: “As it stands it’s worse than useless. I might fry it.”

Stephen Malley’s mother Pat, who bought him the Kindle, said: “I thought it might encourage Stephen to read more. That said I did think it would at least have Tetris on it.

“They should put a sticker on the box saying ‘Warning: is a book’. Then people could make up their own minds.”