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Comment by travisp | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem with this is that my wife and I share our Amazon account. Although we have our own Kindles, we use the same Amazon account because we're not going to buy two copies of every book that we both want to read. If we had to do this, we would probably buy the paper version. So, my "stats", highlights, and my account information include everything she has done with her Kindle.

Until Amazon lets us have separate accounts (or somehow separate our reading), this will be relatively useless for us. We can't even separately rate books, or mark books as "hope to read", "reading", etc. and we're not going to buy double copies just for that purpose. I suspect this is the same for many others.

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Ditto. I've been an Amazon user since the late 90s. They've got an incredible amount of user data about me, including wishlists with thousands of items. That all ends about two years ago. This is when I started buying digital books on my wife's account.

She's not much of an Amazon user, but I bought her a Kindle as a gift first, so...we already had a bunch of digital books attached to her account. So now Amazon has a lot of data about a sort of split personality woman who likes anthropology, travel, cooking, etc. as well as math, programming, photography, etc. This is a massive fail and a loss to Amazon in my mind.

The reason I don't want to buy two of everything, aside from the obvious fact that I don't do this in the real world (i.e., physical books), is that I don't expect these copies to be valid in 10 years. Any DRM-based data is likely to become invalid over time unless it's eventually stripped. Why would I pay twice for that? In addition, it's lower fidelity than the physical book or an equivalent PDF. So I'll probably have to buy it again anyway.

Apple figured this out and now sells MP3s and, ironically, Amazon also sells DRM-free MP3s. I'm sure they're trying to bring publishers into the 21st century. They're just not doing it very well yet.

This is definitely one of my biggest complaints as well. I'd love to see them follow the lead of Amazon Prime and let me specify other accounts within my household that I want to be able to share books (and perhaps other media) with.

Absolutely. My wife and I do the same thing with content from the iTunes store via Home Sharing. No way we'd buy separate copies of electronic books.

why don't you just strip the DRM on the books you buy? It won't help with the social network stuff because Kindle doesn't "see" the stripped versions of the book, but it would allow you to have two accounts for the purposes of 'hope to read', 'reading', etc

No doubt many people do this already. But you shouldn't have to. That technique exists only because DRM has utterly failed to deal with reality.

These comments are specifically about the "social network stuff" and my point is that Amazon's "social network" is useless to me because my wife and I are required to share the same Amazon account if we don't want to double purchase Kindle books.

What benefit would stripping the DRM of the books we buy bring us? We can currently read the books on both our Kindles (allows up to 5 devices), we just can't separate our accounts. How would we get our DRM-stripped Kindle books to show up on separate kindle.amazon.com accounts (putting aside the hassle of not being able to just directly download them on our Kindles)?

How does one do that?

Perhaps this is why Apple's Ping also failed - many legitimate buyer accounts are "small buyer groups" and do not represent individuals?

Personally, I think Ping failed because Apple threw a party and no one cared.

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