Can I Share Novels Between Apple Books And Kindle?

When looking into ways to stream Apple and Amazon Content, search results can be misleading. They contain old Forum Posts, many written in 2012 for file conversion, which unfortunately have not been updated for years, and methods described will most likely not work any more as Apple and Amazon regularly update their DRM in order to close already discovered loopholes. So your best bet for an up-to-date, accurate answer would be the simplest form of ‘no’ and to avoid any file conversion in order to set up a long-term solution. All solutions for file conversion are unofficial, unsupported and can break anytime. So it is best to base your decisions on a hard ‘no’ for now rather than on a quick fix that will not last long.

A book to recommend to the members of my book club has to be shared, too. Kindle sharing is a topic which I always come back to. No, Amazon Prime is not needed to share Kindle books. How the sharing of Kindle books is possible, I explain in this post. Lending books to your friends and family is a bit of an oddity as well. As I mentioned above, not all books can be lent, and you can only lend each book once. I have found it generally works best to email them a DRM-free EPUB copy of the book and then send it to their Kindle via email. It’s not perfect, but it works quite well for me and I’ve managed to recommend a large number of books to friends and family without having to get them a Prime subscription.

Kindle’s Family Library doesn’t work 100% of the time for sharing books, but it’s pretty good for the most part. For example, you can link up family members’ accounts to share eligible books. But a lot of popular authors these days do not allow their books to be shared through Kindle’s Family Library. So we tend to share older books, like sci-fi and romance titles. Often we’ll find out after we purchase a new release that it’s not eligible for sharing, but we’ve managed to save a lot of money on books that are shareable. Just be sure to check the details of a book before you assume it can be shared.

Your archived items are also archived on your old device (even if you deleted them from your downloaded books list to make room). Now that you have a device with more storage, you might want to re-download some of these archived books. Make sure you’re viewing your library as ‘All’ or ‘Cloud’ and not just ‘Downloaded’. I discovered that I have a complete history of all my purchases over the last years, and can even re-download books I’ve purchased on sale years ago (I found three such books from 2017 that I had purchased but never read). Transferring to a new device became a fun library excavation.

Most of my novels get transferred to my Kindle from my Mac on a weekly basis. The most straightforward way to do this is via USB. You just connect the Kindle to your Mac, open up the Kindle’s ‘Documents’ folder, and dump your novels in there. If a novel is a non-MOBI PDF or some other format, I use Calibre to convert it to MOBI in a flash. Calibre is free and very easy to use – just add your novel, choose your output format, and export it to your Kindle. Emailing your Kindle is another great way to wirelessly send novels. All of your Kindles are listed on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Click on the email address associated with each Kindle and attach the novel you want to send to it. Type “convert” in the subject line of the email if you are sending a novel that is not already in MOBI or PDF format. There is also a “Send to Kindle” app available for Macs that allows you to drag and drop the novels you want to send to your Kindle and the app will automatically convert them for you. I use Dropbox too. When I’m reading a book on my iPad and I get a chance to sit at my Mac, I upload the file to my Dropbox account, open the book on my Mac, and share it with my Kindle from the ‘Share’ menu. This method is really cool if you have multiple devices. Make sure the book is in the correct format for your Kindle before you send it though.

When you’re counting on Kindle highlights to keep your reading experience with friends alive, you can gather your most appreciated lines and thoughts of a recently read book in no time. As you can see from my recent reading experience with ‘The Night Circus’ by Erin Morgenstern, after highlighting all the quotes that had an impact on me, I can share them with you right away and spark some unforgettable conversations about the book via messaging apps, social media and many other channels and platforms. Sharing your favorite moments from your reads with friends is a great way to encourage them to read a book and then discuss it with you afterwards – perfect for suggesting other books to read as well and start some memorable discussions. In turn, it can lead to the opportunity of further discussing a particular book and even suggesting other titles that you think the other party would enjoy. You can share your highlighted passages with your friends to create memorable conversations and also inspire them to read a book that you loved. So go ahead and share your favorite moments from your latest read!

As mentioned earlier, some authors actually enable you to share their eBooks under specific circumstances. Examples for such actions by authors could be the promotion of a ‘share this eBook with a friend’ eBook. Please note though, that such actions explicitly grant you a temporary right to sharing, i.e. not anonymized, limitless distribution of PDFs via torrent sites. It’s also worth remembering that copyright is held by the author, and even where we might wish to help spread a work more widely, the author may have other ideas. If they say ‘please share’, we should. If there is no indication at all that they intend to allow sharing – even in the absence of explicit restriction via a ‘ban on sharing’ – then we should assume no permission is granted. Follow your favorite authors on social media as they announce sales, free periods of time to read their work and sanctioned events to share their work. The best way to read more books and support your favorite authors is within the legal structure of their copyright.

Shared reading experiences for a fandom. I am part of a book club and we read books on our Kindles and use a private Goodreads group for our shared reading experience. We can add notes and highlights to our eBooks and if enabled, other club members can see the most popular parts of the book as well as their friends’ highlights. All highlights are synced to the members’ devices whether they added them on their e-reader or laptop. Thus, my highlighted quotes are synced and I can access them when I write my discussion post for the book club. Shared reading becomes a little less solitary thanks to this technology.

I can confidently say that the Kindle app for Kindle Fire supports a vast majority of novels, but there are some exceptions. The Kindle Store offers millions of titles, including bestsellers, classics, and indie books, all readable on the Fire. However, certain publishers or authors might restrict their books to specific platforms due to licensing agreements. For example, some Japanese light novels or niche indie works might not be available. Additionally, you can sideload books not purchased from Amazon by converting files to compatible formats like MOBI or AZW3 using tools like Calibre. The Kindle Fire also supports PDFs, though the reading experience varies. It's worth noting that subscription services like Kindle Unlimited expand your options significantly, but not every novel is included. Always check the book's details page on Amazon to confirm compatibility.

I have found many people to misunderstand this function because Kindle books are not simple files that one can email to themselves. Kindle books are protected by Digital Rights Management and are meant to be read within Amazon’s eco-system. Therefore, to download books previously purchased, one simply registers a new device to their Amazon account and all of their prior purchases will download. I find it is like having a Netflix account. One does not transfer a movie from one TV to another. Instead, one simply logs into Netflix on the new TV. This also applies to books that have been borrowed from Prime Reading or from Kindle Unlimited. Those books will only download if one currently has an active membership.