You Can’t Bequeath Kindle Books

 After my dad passed away I had to go through the mess that was his office.  Buried in one of his desk drawers was my mother’s iPad.  She passed away in early 2022, so her vintage 2018 iPad sat buried in a drawer for two and a half years.

Thinking I might be able to Ebay it for $50 I re-powered the battery and booted it up and spent all of one minute cracking the pass code using her birthday.  Once I was in I found my dad did delete her email before throwing it into a drawer, but he didn’t delete her Kindle ap.

Kindle was still was linked her unused Amazon account (separate from my Dad’s) and has over 100 books, a treasure trove of reading that she would have paid over $1K from the time she started migrating from paper to electronic around 2012.  The problem is how to get $1K of content off the old $50 iPad over to MY iPad?

Turns out that when you buy an ebook, you don’t own it.  You only are getting a license to use it untilyou die.  That’s right, ebooks and similar content cannot be passed down or transferred, so I can’t tell Amazon I am the rightful heir and to send that $1K of ebooks my way post haste.  In fact, if you tell Amazon someone is dead and prove it they will clamp down their account right quick.

The obvious way around this would be to pretend she is still alive, log into her Amazon account, and put me on “family sharing”, which is how you normally share ebooks in a household.  I luckily found her old Amazon password on a piece of paper in another drawer, which sat idle for the past two and a half years.  The bad news is after 2.5 years without activity Amazon wants two-factor proof for me to log in, and both the email and phone that are on her account were shut down long ago. 

I could try to social engineer Amazon Support into updating her account with a new email and phone (and over the phone is the only way to do this), or I could just use her old iPad as a reader until I get through her content.

Before deciding what to do I went through the content and deleted anything I already read, which removed over two dozen books (mostly books we recommended to one another, so makes sense).  Looking at what was left, turns out her tastes were a bit different from mine.  The remaining library is a good 2/3 police procedurals, which I might grab for a plane flight, but otherwise find boring (same story over and over).  The remaining 1/3 has a few novels which look interesting, but in the end it is definitely not the full $1K in content I was originally expecting.

At the end of the day I will skip trying to cheat my way past Amazon and just keep the iPad as a reader until I get through the books I want to read, then finally get rid of it.  By the time I sell the old iPad its value will be less than the $50 it is worth today, but I will make up for that by reading a few books off it.