But Amazon throws an interesting curve to keep it in the family: The system only works if you and the other person grant access to each other’s Amazon payment details. The other adult doesn’t have to be your spouse you can share with anyone who has their own Amazon account. Your reading progress and bookmarks are independent of your spouse. Books can be shared with anyone in the “household.” Once sharing is set up, all of the other person’s books appear in your library with no fuss, as if you had purchased them. This tip is about how to live in the world the way it is, not the way it should be.Īmazon now allows you to create a “household” with another adult and up to four children. DRM and copyright issues make some people quiver with rage, and with good reason! I share their outrage. In the worst case, you might even find it’s been taken away from you. An ebook is more or less locked to you you might own it forever but you don’t have the same right to pass it on. Once you buy a real book, you can lend it to anyone you like and you can give it away. It exposes the critical shortcoming of ebooks compared to physical books. (Oddly, she has never wanted to read any of my books. That left her without an easy way to read the books she purchased before the split unless she borrows my Kindle, and I haven’t been able to read any of the books she’s purchased since then unless I grab her Kindle. She set up a separate account and since then we’ve been growing our separate libraries. We have separate bookshelves for our physical books and she wanted a separate virtual bookshelf for her Kindle books. Back when we shared a single Amazon account, my wife discovered that she really, really hated having my virtual books mixed in with hers on her Kindle. The new “ Family Library” is a bit confusing to set up but the effort is worth it if you want to read some of the books that have been purchased in your spouse’s Amazon account.įour years ago I wrote an article about the importance of having a separate Amazon account from your spouse. Amazon now allows you to share your Kindle books with your spouse and your children.

Kindlebooks