How to manage my kid's new Kindle

December 28, 2015 12:55 PM

Help me think about the best way to manage my kid's new Kindle that he was gifted for the holidays?

Kid BlahLaLa got a Kindle. I am a Kindle addict, both in my personal and professional lives (I'm a book editor). I purchase books from Amazon endlessly, have other book files that I put on my Kindle, have Amazon Prime, etc. I do not subscribe to Kindle Unlimited. And a lot of my books, both professional and personal, are not appropriate for my kid to read. But we are both big readers and enjoy both reading the same book at the same time and talking about it.

So how to do this? Some ideas:
-- Register his Kindle under my Amazon account so I can purchase books and send them there? Makes it easier to share books that we do want to both read. Be more observant when it comes to which device I send my purchases to so I don't accidentally send an inappropriate book to his device?

-- Register it under a new account in his name (this seems like the right thing, but set me straight if I'm wrong). Don't link a credit card to it so he can't purchase books willy nilly? Purchase books on my account and gift them to him?

I'm a bit of a technophobe and I wonder if there are things I'm not thinking about here. Kindle users who are parents, how do you handle this?

posted by BlahLaLa to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Best answer: This may be what you're looking for? It seems like you can make family accounts with Adult and child profiles that you can chose which books to share. Not sure if there's a way to let them buy their own books.
posted by edbles at 1:08 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

If kid is under 13 you may not be able to make a new account in his name. Just a thought.
posted by fiercecupcake at 1:15 PM on December 28, 2015

My friend who has two kids with their own Kindles swears by the Family Accounts* with parental purchasing controls and the FreeTime app.

*I share an account with my husband and when I first set up the Family account I had to go in and un-share all my crap he's not interested in, and every time I buy something I have to hit the unshare button (which, thankfully, is on the confirmation page of the purchase), but possibly you can set it to default not sharing.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:16 PM on December 28, 2015

Response by poster: Okay, thanks for telling me about the family accounts. That's a good first step.

It's astoundingly annoying that there's no bulk way to take the 350+ books I have and "unshare" them with his account. And even when doing it manually they limit it to ten at a time. What a pain in the ass. So I've had to disable his access to the cloud. Oh well.

Will keep watching this thread to see if anybody has additional info or best practices to share.
posted by BlahLaLa at 2:59 PM on December 28, 2015

If you don't have an objection to removing DRM from books that you've paid for, then you could easily do that (there's a program called calibre that many people use) and then transfer to him the books you choose. I think you can also use calibre to send things wirelessly to his kindle, though I'm not positive.

Regarding him buying books, you could set up a separate account for him and let him have amazon gift cards (or the prepaid credit card kind) for specific amounts as you like.

You can also see if the library offers ebooks that might interest him.
posted by egg drop at 12:10 AM on December 29, 2015

Kindles have a specific application for this, called Free Time. Here's how to set Free Time up. Since you don't say what kind of Kindle you have, you can also search Google for Kindle model + Free Time setup.
posted by Brittanie at 10:50 AM on December 29, 2015

When you create a child profile in family accounts, you then select the things you want to share with the account. You shouldn't have to 'unshare' unless you previously 'shared'. At least, that's how it worked when I set up an account to let my nephew use on my kindle. I selected 'manually share' items, and it gave me a screen to pick through all my books/videos/apps/etc. individually.
posted by lovecrafty at 11:47 AM on December 29, 2015

Response by poster: So what I did was set up the family share, and then used the parental controls on his Kindle to turn off the cloud sharing. That meant he wouldn't be able to access other stuff from our account by himself. Not that he would, but just in case.

One issue: for some stupid reason Amazon then made his Kindle the automatic default for all new purchases. It took me a few purchases to notice this happening, so I had to go in and manually change it back to my own Kindle. So keep an eye out for that if you set up family sharing.
posted by BlahLaLa at 12:25 PM on January 28, 2016