How to share Kindle ebooks with Amazon Household using family library on Fire tablets?

[Brian G Turner]

I'd already set up my household on my Amazon Prime - myself, my wife, my three kids. Fine.

Using the Amazon website I've been to "Manage content and devices" and "Manage my family library" and shared a selection of books with each of them. Fine.

The problem is... none of my kids can view any of the books I've tried to share with their profiles.

I have a Fire HDX, everyone else has a Fire HD8.

I can view their profiles on my Fire and see what I'm supposed to be sharing with them - all looks good there.

But nothing shows in the library of their Kindles.

I contacted Amazon by email - they said they'd need me to ring. So I rang, but the person I spoke to said I'd have to set up my profile on their devices.

And yet I can't set up my profile on their devices because I'm already listed as a member of their household!

Has anyone else had this problem, or know how to work around it? Normally I like Amazon, but I feel like I'm trying to get help from people who are simply reading from scripts and don't understand the problem.

 

[tinkerdan]

Added note::
You may have already done all of this::
How to share books on a Kindle with family and friends
::however it doesn't hurt to check.
------------------------------

I have 4 kindle devices--unfortunately they are all under the same account initially so I'm not sure it helps with your problem.
I guess the first question might be whether those kindles each have separate accounts and were acquired that way.

As it is I did set up a family library because I had a chrome book with kindle cloud and wanted to limit its access to Amazon so I set up an unpaid account and then linked it with the family account. I've not had trouble getting any of the books plus I have on occasion used that account to acquire free books and those seem to cross over into the family account just fine.

I haven't tried to use a regular pc and the pc kindle software to register under that account--maybe if I did I could see what happens.
However the next question that comes to mind is whether you have parental controls turned on and just how that works. I don't have any young children using these so we don't use any controls. Perhaps you should look into that.

I do know that when I purchase an E-book amazon asks if I want to share it with the other devices or users in the family account and I have that checked ok as default.

Also in the amazon account there is a place in managing devices and content where you can push the books to other devices and you might try that.

However; as far as I can tell those books should be showing up in the cloud part of the amazon devices. I can't recall any time that they haven't.

I did just now noticed that any kindle unlimited are not included in those shared across the family library. I don't have prime so I couldn't say what happens with the free prime offerings. I suspect that might be the same--so if those books are acquired that way you may have to find out from amazon what the rules and expectations are concerning those and adjust your buying practices to accommodate that.

 

[Paul_C]

If you've got a PC or similar you could always copy the files off your Kindle and then onto theirs - this could also be done with a (IIRC) mini USB to mini USB lead (if such a thing exists).

I imagine Amazon might frown at this behaviour though.

 

[Vertigo]

If you've got a PC or similar you could always copy the files off your Kindle and then onto theirs - this could also be done with a (IIRC) mini USB to mini USB lead (if such a thing exists).

I imagine Amazon might frown at this behaviour though.

I think if you do that you'd have to strip the DRM as that is keyed specifically to the machine it was downloaded for, indeed I think that is exactly why this mechanism is needed to do it legitimately.

 

[Brian G Turner]

In the end I simply set up the Kindle App on my old iPad, and passed it on to my youngest. Now she can read the quick guides to particle physics, quantum mechanics, and relativity at her leisure.