How to Manage Two Kindles, One Account, and Multiple Wishlists

June 16, 2013 12:14 PM

I own a Kindle associated with my Amazon account. For his birthday this year my son received a Kindle Fire, which we decided to also associate with my account so that he can share access to the books I already own. All was well until he realized he could add things to a wish list. I took his first round of wishes and added them to a new "Son's Wishlist," and when he's shopping for books my son can choose which wishlist he wants to add them to. But physical items can apparently only be added to the default wishlist (mine) and I haven't found a way on the Fire for him to move them. As a result I regularly find myself sorting dozens of collectible cards and other items from my list to his. Have any of you found a better way of dealing with this?
posted by Songdog to Technology (4 answers total)

If the primary benefit of keeping his kindle under your account is to give him access to your kindle books, you can do that by stripping the DRM and copying them to his kindle. And then put his kindle under its own amazon account.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:20 PM on June 16, 2013

Stripping DRM is certainly a solution. However, it involves multiple installations (Kindle desktop app, calibre, the DRM-stripping plugin for calibre which is a tad difficult to track down in the latest version) and is generally a bit of a hassle. --And also technically illegal, I believe? (May have changed in the last few months with new policy interpretations of the laws in question.)

How important is it for your son to have access to your books? Can they be "lent" to him? I don't know exactly how the Kindle ecosystem works because I've chosen to go the techy DRM-free route, but I also find myself buying DRM-free legal ebooks directly from publishers whenever possible, even if it's a bit more expensive, because I get to avoid the DRM stripping process of downloading to Kindle for PC, opening up the book, navigating to the correct directory, importing into calibre, and sideloading via USB. << That is what is required to get a Kindle DRM-free ebook onto a Kindle, you can't just download it directly from Amazon via the device.
posted by serelliya at 2:14 PM on June 16, 2013

Why don't you just make his wish list the default one? Seems the easiest way to handle to me. You are having to do more work as it is anyway, so I don't see a real advantage to keeping your list as the default. Just means when you add things there is one more click to do so. (You can change default list by going to "manage my lists" from the kindle wish list main page). Unfortunately I don't know anyway of assigning separate default wishes to two kindles on same account.
posted by batikrose at 2:44 PM on June 16, 2013 [1 favorite]

You can lend Kindle books to another Kindle (or even non-Kindle-device) user. The limitation is that you can only lend them once for 14 days.
posted by dhartung at 1:31 AM on June 17, 2013 [1 favorite]