Sharing Books

[amissash]

Has anyone figured out a way to share downloaded books with other
kindle users?

[Kathy]

You can share books if you are on the same Amazon account. You can have 6 Kindles registered to one account. Different credit cards can be added to the account, but you have to be careful that you are using the right credit card before using the one-click feature.

[Betsy the Quilter]

Someone has also deregistered the Kindle from their account, registered it to her husband's account and downloaded books, then deregistered from the husband's account and reregistered to her account and was able to keep the books.   I got tired just thinking about it, and don't know if Amazon will figure out how to prevent this, but it seemed to work so far.  There's a post somewhere....

Betsy

[mwvickers]

Or you could exchange Kindles with someone.  But we all know that isn't going to happen.  LOL

[dpd346]

I am very new at all this...the kindle (patiently waiting since December 11th!!) and message boards (my first) so please bear with me.
I so far understand that an account can have up to 6 kindles registered to it but how many accounts can a kindle be registered on?  Only 1?  Regarding sharing books, I just thought that you can have a friend register their kindle to your account for sharing books only but they could have their own account to actually purchase books on their own credit card.  This must not be the case?  I am (un)patiently waiting on mine and trying to talk a friend into getting one too.

[Mikuto]

A single Kindle can only be registered to one account. So your friend cannot register his Kindle to your account and download your books, unless he de-registers his Kindle from his account, then he's up a creek for ordering books for himself.

[Betsy the Quilter]

Each Kindle can only be registered to one account at a time.  So to register it to another account, you must deregister it first.

Accounts can have more than one credit card associated with them, but only one can be set up to do one-click at a time.  You can switch between cards by going into account preferences and setting a particular card as the default card before buying.

Betsy

[mwvickers]

dpd346,

My understanding is that you can register your Kindle to as many accounts as you would want, but the catch is that it can only be registered to one account at a time.  Therefore, to register it to another account, you would have to deregister it from its present account, register it to a new account, and download a book you would want to read.  Then, you would have to deregister it from that account and reregister it to the original one if you wanted those books.  

I'm not sure, but I've heard that a book disappears from the Kindle once you turn the Whispernet on if you deregister it from the account the book is on.  

Someone else can correct me if I'm wrong.  

As far as sharing accounts, yes,  you can have up to six Kindles on one account; my father and I share one account, so we can read any books that the other purchases.  

[dpd346]

Thanks so much for your (quick) answers.  I am sure once I get my kindle I will have many more.  My kindle is suppose to ship between March 3rd and March 16th.  I was reading the posts regarding the February 9th announcement and the possible version2.  Not sure how or if this will affect me as I just want my book!

[SusanCassidy]

I would not rely on switching accounts.  It is possible that Amazon might restrict that in future.  If you trust someone enough, you could share accounts.

[amissash]

Thank you all for sharing your information

[edfleiss]

regarding having books dissappear i can speak from experience, when you deregister you do not lose books from your whispernet. I was victim of a very strange malaise a few months back - my screen fractured  from atmosphere pressure shift, one minute i'm reading, next my screen is a star pattern. Amazon never saw it before. they just swapped my unit out. when i got the new one. i deregistered the  old one and registered the new one, all of my books were there. the interesting thing though was my NYT subscription- it did not move. that dissappeared. i had to cancel my sub and resubscribe with the new kindle

[SusanCassidy]

edfleiss: your situation is different than people getting books from another account.  You added another Kindle onto the same account.  All Kindles on the same account can share books (via Content Manager, etc.).

However, if you take your Kindle off of one account, and put it on another account, you cannot download the books from the first account any more.  If the books are already in Kindle memory, they will probably stay there until you delete them, but it is technically feasible for Amazon to have them deleted if you connect via Whispernet.  I don't know if they would, however.

[LindaW]

However, if you take your Kindle off of one account, and put it on another account, you cannot download the books from the first account any more.  If the books are already in Kindle memory, they will probably stay there until you delete them, but it is technically feasible for Amazon to have them deleted if you connect via Whispernet.  I don't know if they would, however.

I wonder if this would also work if you put all of your books on an SD card - then changed your Kindle to another account. 

[LindaW]

Since my book budget has decreased a bit due to these scary economic times, I'm actually buying more paperbacks and less Kindle books.  I swap the paperbacks with friends and family and therefore are getting more bang for my buck. I buy 3-4 books, but since we exchange I get to read anywhere from 12-15 for the same money. 

I basically buy 3 categories of books:

1. to keep forever - Kindle
2. to share - paperbacks
3. large coffee table books - no go on a Kindle

I love my Kindle - but I'm not thrilled with the inability to share.  Also, I don't like the fact that Amazon keeps my purchases for back-up purposes.  When I buy songs, etc. for my i-Pod, I am responsible for my own back-ups, not Apple.  I guess it's a control thing - but I'm not sold on it exactly.  Won't they eventually run out of space or the ability to maintain all those books for buyers??

[KindleMom]

Not sharing bothers me too.  I've always passed around books with friends and now when they ask me what I have to share I just hold my Kindle.  It makes me feel bad.   

[Mikuto]

Personally I like that Amazon.com holds my books so I can redownload them if necessary. What if I had them backed up on my PC, and both my PC and my Kindle got stolen or lost (airports, I'm looking at you!) I would be S.O.L. on getting my books back.

As for sharing books...you're technically not supposed to share MP3's either. More often than not, sharing takes money out of the pockets of the people who created the work. DRM is cumbersome, but as a writer, I can understand why writers and copyright holders want some sort of assurance that their book won't just be bought once, then spread all around the internet.

Also, and this is an aside more than anything else, am I the only person who never shared their books? I would buy it, read it, and put it on my shelf for later. If I thought someone should read it, I would give them a recommendation, but certainly not give them MY copy of the book!

[KindleMom]

I've never shared an MP3.  Or downloaded anything illegally.  I'm married to an artist and he's very senstive about copyright laws, etc. 

But sharing a book?  I did that all of the time.  I knew when I got the Kindle I wouldn't be doing this anymore.  I'm just saying that I miss that part of my friendships.  I feel like I'm not contributing to the well-roundedness of my friends' reading experiences.  I'm a lot more liberal than most of them.   

[Mikuto]

I understand if you never shared an MP3 or downloaded anything illegally, but you don't feel that sharing a book with somebody, so that they could read it without paying the author for it, is the same thing?

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not attacking you or the fact that you shared books, I'm just curious.

[KindleMom]

Nope.  I don't.  Are libraries illegal?  And when passing around a book you don't keep it forever like you would a digital file.  You return it.  If you want a permanat copy you have to buy your own copy.  Unlike digital files.

[Mikuto]

You bring up a great point with libraries, physical books have to be returned, and if the person wants a physical copy for their own library, they must buy it themselves.

This is why you cannot share books with people on the Kindle. Ebooks are the same as mp3s in this sense. If you bought a single copy of a Kindle book, and could share it with a friend, they would have no need to return it to you or buy a permanent copy, because by sharing it, you would be making a copy of it, same as any other digital file.

[KindleMom]

You bring up a great point with libraries, physical books have to be returned, and if the person wants a physical copy for their own library, they must buy it themselves.

This is why you cannot share books with people on the Kindle. Ebooks are the same as mp3s in this sense. If you bought a single copy of a Kindle book, and could share it with a friend, they would have no need to return it to you or buy a permanent copy, because by sharing it, you would be making a copy of it, same as any other digital file.

I understood that when I was thinking about getting a Kindle.  I'm just saying that I miss that aspect of my reading experience.  That's all.

[geko29]

I love my Kindle - but I'm not thrilled with the inability to share.  Also, I don't like the fact that Amazon keeps my purchases for back-up purposes.  When I buy songs, etc. for my i-Pod, I am responsible for my own back-ups, not Apple.  I guess it's a control thing - but I'm not sold on it exactly.  Won't they eventually run out of space or the ability to maintain all those books for buyers??

No, for two reasons:

1)  If they actually were storing all those individual copies, it wouldn't cost very much.  Average book size is well under a MB, and I've yet to see one much over 10 (and that was a highly technical book with a lot of diagrams).  So if you accept 1MB as the average file size, then assume that in a few years there are 10 million kindle owners with 100 books each on average (A ridiculously high assumption, but bear with me), that's 1 PetaByte of storage.  That would cost roughly $200k at current prices.  No small sum, to be sure, but I work for a small company (130 employees) that spent $140k on a single storage device last year, so it's not like it's out of Amazon's reach.

2)  There's no reason for Amazon to store all those individual files, and in fact experience tells us they don't.  All they need to do is keep a master file, then generate one keyed to your Kindle on the fly as you request it, which is beyond trivial.  Again, we did something similar last year, and delivered roughly 140,000 such files to end users over a 3-day period.  For proof of this, note the manner in which people get updated versions of kindle books (with typos or formatting corrected, for example).  They delete the copy on their Kindle, then re-download.  This would be almost impossible to manage if there were actually individual user directories--every time a book was updated, they'd have to find every person who had previously purchased that book, and replace the old version in their library.

[Mikuto]

I understood that when I was thinking about getting a Kindle.  I'm just saying that I miss that aspect of my reading experience.  That's all.

Makes sense, although I never did share books. I always afraid people would spill stuff on them or never give them back!

[Leslie]

I rarely shared paper books and when I did, I accepted the fact that I was giving it away, never to be seen again. No big deal, that's just the way it was.

With the Kindle, I am sharing more since I have a friend on the account with me. She's in California and I am in Maine. There is no way we'd be mailing paper books back and forth but we've probably "co-read" 12-15 books in the past 6 months.

L