

Amazon will soon announce a way to loan Kindle books for short periods, so she’ll be able to read them on her Kindle instead of having to borrow mine. We still own the books, she can still read them. Which is a lovely book, I’m told! It just diverges from my tastes in, roughly, every conceivable way. The books that she bought and read and loved until now – they’re mine. When we transferred the Kindle to her, it arrived empty.They’ll be there on her next Kindle and her computer and her phone, too – remember, we’re thinking long-term about what it means to create an entire library over a period of years and decades. Everything she buys from this day forward is hers and hers alone, and only her books will show on her Kindle. The Kindle could be transferred to her account.I did some research and spoke to Amazon representatives to confirm what I suspected. Without knowing it, we had set up a single bookshelf when we really needed two. My books started showing up on my wife’s Kindle like unwanted intruders. It seems likely that I’ll have my own Kindle eventually.

In the last few months I’ve started occasionally buying Kindle books and reading them on my computer and phone. But we kept buying Kindle books on my account because, hey, that’s the way the Kindle was registered. Later she set up her own Amazon account so she could shop and see “Recommendations” and books that are “Inspired by your browsing history” without seeing my choices, which tend to involve spaceships shooting a lot of really big guns at each other. I set up my wife’s Kindle on my account, our only Amazon account at that time, the one linked to my email address. This was what my wife saw in her mind when she opened her Kindle every day. In a couple of years, she accumulated a collection of Kindle books that brought her laughter and tears and created memories that came back every time she opened the Kindle and looked down the list of titles – exactly the same feeling that a book lover feels staring at books lined up on a shelf. I bought a Kindle for my wife – a loving, thoughtful gift that she deeply appreciated, so much that it quickly became her preferred way to read books. You can transfer a Kindle to someone else any time, but you cannot transfer your books. The books that you purchase for your Kindle are locked to your Amazon account – your email address.You can switch the Kindle from one account to another readily, at any time, either from the Kindle or from the Amazon page set up to manage your Kindle. A Kindle is associated with an Amazon account.They can be linked together to share an Amazon Prime subscription, but each person can separately keep a shopping cart, a wish list, etc.

