There is a growing need in our increasing isolated digital world to share.
My wife has an Amazon account linked to Kindle books.
I have my account and own set of books. It is frustrating not to be able to connect those two accounts. To not even be able to lend the “not lendable” books to each other is irritating. ((Thanks publishers!))
I would like nothing more than to read some things she has purchased and she’d like to enjoy some of the things I have purchased in return.
The problem is not limited to Amazon’s Kindle.
In Audible((Also owned by Amazon)), I have a growing collection of audiobooks and it’s silly to have two accounts for one family but there is no way for me to share my books with my wife or for her to share the couple of books she collected before we were married.
This would be a moot point if we had started out with a joint account. However, as single people we each had our own account. Even thought I am able to add her to the Amazon Prime plan for the family, we cannot combine any of our other services and are forced to maintain separate accounts and permissions.
The best Amazon was able to suggest when I contacted them was one of two things.
1. To deregister the Kindle or Kindle app we happened to be using and register it in the other person’s name. Not an ideal solution by any means.
2. I was offered a refund on the books I purchased through the Kindle store. Then the offer was taken away since I had “too many” books already. In the words of the Amazon rep I got a reply from,
>I can understand the inconvenience with this. To help you out, I would like to issue refund on your Kindle content orders, if you have placed fewer orders. So that you would be able to buy the content again after registering to your wife’s Kindle. But, you have placed many orders for Kindle content. So, I’m unable to issue refund on all the orders.
So the only solution is to deregister and reregister as my wife and I trade-off using it. This includes redownloading and resyncing any books we had made progress on. That is the only solution for this problem.
Amazon has revolutionized many industries and changed the book buying world. However, this is an area which has seemingly received little to no attention.
Perhaps it has and perhaps it is the publishers not wanting the risk of “piracy” to rob them of their sales. I would love to be able to limit sharing to a physical address, or even just a single other Amazon account. This is not piracy.
Perhaps one day there will be a way to share digital content between two linked accounts. Perhaps there will come a time when technology will catch up with their analog equivalents.