What I really want is family lending. Sooner or later my wife will get a Kindle or something capable of reading Amazon books, and I want to be able to easily lend books to her without handing over my Kindle.

I know quite a few families in this situation that just re-register kindles between Amazon accounts when they want to grab a different book. According to them, registering a device switches its account, but does not delete or remove stuff you already have on it.

This does seem to be something that needs to be broadly considered when it comes to new technology. For example, Netflix - one account for my household, but there's no separation between recommendations for my wife, my son, myself (which makes for some amusing confusion). In general, the possibility of personalization needs to be considered for applications where you want single-billing but might have many individuals within that account.

Netflix does have sub-accounts to allow for different family members. It works reasonably well, but you can only stream video using the primary account.

Since streaming is often the main source in my family, the sub-accounts don't appear to solve the recommendations issue.

You can have multiple devices registered to the same Kindle account. My wife and I use the same Amazon login to buy everything (yay, Amazon Prime), including Kindle books. That means her iPad and my Kindle both get to download and read the same books. No lending necessary.

Yeah, that works, but still isn't 100% ideal. I don't want Phillip Roth books showing up in my recommendations. Ever. And my wife does not want to see books about Erlang or science fiction (although she has been enjoying some of the Louis L'Amour books we stashed in our carry ons coming home from Oregon).

What if Philip Roth wrote some science fiction about Erlang? Would that be okay?

I'm kidding to make a point: marriage is seldom a 100% ideal proposition. In my house we intermingle our books. Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" is next to Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff". The benefit of sharing an amazon account makes up for the fact that I may see books she's interested at Amazon.com.

^This. Shared iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon Prime (even with nearby extended family).

The economics make the annoyances worth it.

"This." isn't a sentence in English.

The economics are a result of Amazon's arbitrary restrictions, something that they could change by fiddling around with their code a bit to try different things.

As things stand, yeah, it's probably worth it to share, but I'm just pointing out how I think things could be better.

I believe you can lend, to friends or family or whomever, if the publisher allows, and for whatever time frame the publisher permits (I've only seen two weeks as the limit, but the wording is such that it may vary). The inconvenience is that if you lend a book to someone else, you lose the ability to read it until you get it back.

> if you lend a book to someone else, you lose the ability to read it until you get it back.

Same as with a real book. I think the limits we're all used to with physical objects seem, in some cases, a bit less onerous than weird, arbitrary ones. "I bought it, I should be able to do what I want with my copy".

I agree-- plus you get the added bonus of being sure you get your book back. That's not something you can take for granted with physical objects.

I guess this is why the other book lending services got crushed ...