If you’re reading my blog, you probably already know that my husband and I are both ridiculous Internet nerds. We’ve each had our own online presence since before we met, much less started dating. So when we got married, we had to figure out what to merge and what not to merge. We retain our separate blogs and Flickr accounts, we’re horrified at the idea of sharing an email address (though us -at- tom and tiff dawt com forwards to both of us) because it seems like sharing underwear, we have separate Twitter accounts, etc. We moved our webhosting onto one account, we share one Amazon Prime account (because you can share it between multiple Amazon accounts at the same address- we still have our own Amazon personas with wish lists and recommendations), etc.
What we were really looking to merge was our digital property, much like we merged our physical property. (Yes, I realize digital content purchases are really “licenses” rather than “ownership,” but those licenses are still a form of property, so hear me out.)
We both started buying music from iTunes before we were married. So when we got married, we had two different iTunes accounts with music tied to those specific accounts. Now, the Apple DRM scheme permitted us to authorize up to 5 computers, so we could still accommodate our needs if we did a little work, but there are some limitations to how the authorization is implemented that made this more of a pain than it needed to be. The flaw in the assumption of how the DRM worked was that a person with an account would never have legitimate shared ownership of what they had purchased. The 5 computer thing helped, but it would have been better if an account owner could designate a second account as “spouse,” so that the license property held in common could behave that way without a lot of authorizing and de-authorizing (because you have to authorize and de-authorize the computer’s user accounts, not just the whole computer).
(Fortunately, the iTunes store has moved to a DRM-free music catalog, so that should make sharing music within our household a lot easier in the future.)
Meanwhile, however, the Kindle implements this flawed assumption without the flexibility of being able to have multiple accounts linked to the same device like you could with iTunes and your computer. Tom and I each have our separate Amazon accounts, and while we can designate both of those accounts as belonging to the same family for the purpose of using Amazon Prime, we don’t seem to be able to do so for the purpose of using two Kindles.
Right now, if we buy a book we both want to read, say, the latest Dresden Files novel, it arrives in an Amazon box. I read it (usually staying up half the night because I am engrossed), and then when I am done Tom reads it (while I anxiously wait for him to finish so we can talk about it.) Meanwhile, while he’s reading it, I can move on to another book or something.
But because a Kindle can only be tied to one Amazon account, it can only have Tom’s Books, or Tiff’s Books. Which means that in order for both of us to adopt the Kindle, either one of us has to give up our Amazon account, and its accumulated 10 years of purchase history, wish lists, and recommendations (and don’t knock it- I use the recommendations feature TONS) so that we buy all of our Kindle books on the same account, or we have to buy all the books we’re BOTH interested in as physical books, which defeats the purpose of having a Kindle. Or buy the Kindle book twice, which is still often more expensive than buying the physical copy once.
In googling a bit, it looks like you and swap authorizations on your Kindle as often as you want, but I can’t find any information about convenient/inconvenient that is. Would I have to re-download everything every time I did that? Because that would be a giant FAIL. It sounds like books from the de-authorized account disappear eventually, but I can’t figure out how long it takes.
And note: What I’m really talking about here is sharing content within the Tom and Tiffany Bridge household. We’re not interested in buying content and then sharing it with the whole world, but since we are married, anything I buy is also legally owned by Tom, so it would be nice if the stuff I buy would ACT like Tom also owns it. And this is what I mean by licensing as a form of property- I realize that when I buy digital content, all I’m really buying is a license to it. But that license is still our community property, and that license should behave that way. And all it would take is the ability for two accounts to designate each other as “spouse” or “legal domestic partner” or something like that.
After all, this situation exists because we were geeky enough to embrace the Amazon model early. We’re very good Amazon customers, so I’m disappointed that it hasn’t occurred to Amazon to accommodate us.
