Are you familiar with how Amazon Household works?
You basically connect two adult Amazon accounts together and they can share benefits (including Prime shipping, Prime Video streaming, and Amazon First Reads). You can also add up to four children’s profiles to your Amazon Household.
Free shipping and video streaming is all well and good, but the great part of Amazon Household is the Amazon Family Library.
This allows you to share your Kindle books and audiobooks (and apps, but I don’t care much about those) with someone else for my favorite price. Free!
You can choose who that other adult is so it might be your spouse but it could also be your mom or sister or friend who has a terrific digital library that you’d like to share.
Here’s how it works.
How to use Amazon Family Library
Go to the Household page on Amazon.
You’ll see your account and the option to add another adult.
Choose “Manage Your Family Library” and it’ll first require you to share your debit/credit card access for your account.
Obviously, this part means you’ll want it to be someone you really trust. Some random person you went to high school with? Probably not.
Once that’s done, you’ll be able to turn on Amazon Family Library sharing for any of the following categories: Apps/Games, Audiobooks, and eBooks. You can turn those on for both people or one person but not both (so you might share your audiobooks to the Amazon Family Library but the other person doesn’t share their audiobooks).
Once that’s done, when you open the Audible app or your Kindle, you’ll see their content in your library as well and you can read or listen at will! (It won’t mess up their reading or listening because you’re each using your own accounts and devices and it is smart enough to know that you’re different people).
You can also add eBooks or audiobooks on a case-by-case basis to a child’s FreeTime account if they’re in your household (you can see instructions on how to do that here) but all your content won’t suddenly appear in their library.
Weirdly (and I don’t know the reasoning for this), you can’t share content with a teen profile in your household. Why you could let your child read one of your purchased eBooks but not your teen, I do not know.
If there are items you would rather NOT share with the other adult in your household account, you can go to Manage My Content in Amazon, click the three dots next to the title you don’t want to share, choose “Manage Family Library” and when the names of everyone in your Household pop up, just click “Remove From Library.”
Anyway, it’s a pretty nifty little way to easily share books and audiobooks with someone else!
Any other questions about Amazon Family Library? I’m happy to try to answer!
Hi!
What do I need to do to give my kids access to their library? I figured out how to share with my husband, but not my kids. I added them to my household. Do they need an app?
Yes, they’ll either need a Kindle or Audible app.
How do they log in? I set up a child profile and added books to the library, but I don’t know how she would access it since Amazon didn’t ask for an email address or anything for the child. If I log in with my Amazon password (that I am NOT going to give her), I see my entire library.
What device are you using?
Hi this is helpful, however I can’t find any info on how my kids using an iOS device can access books in family library. Surely I don’t have to have a free time subscription for this?
I’m running into the same problem. I set up a child account. We have the audible app on a new ipod touch and I can’t figure out how to log in for her to access only the contents I am sharing with my daughter.
I’ve talked to 3 Amazon/Audible reps and they have not been able to help me set this up. Thank you.
I would love to know if anyone has since discovered how my child can access the ebooks shared with their child profile on Amazon Household? The only way I can find so far is to 1) pay for a amazon kids+ subscription so they can view the books through that app or 2) install the kindle app on their iPad and log in with my Amazon account. I don’t want an amazon kids+ subscription, nor do I want my child to access all my kindle books via their iPad. Thanks.
Where do I go to see the books that have been added to the family library? Do I just have to know what to look for?
As far as I can tell the story is misleading and wasted my time. If you want your kids to use Kindle on an iPad or iPhone, there is no way to share only books appropriate to them, they will view your entire library as well as book suggestions for you instead of them. AMAZON sucks