Buying kindle books for multiple accounts in India

This post is about using Amazon.com to buy books and maintain a shared library while also having an amazon.in account.

My husband, Akash and I have a shared kindle library using Amazon’s Family Library feature. This is something that is possible only if you have accounts on the Amazon.com (and not the .in) website. So I purchase my books on the .com website and use .in for other “goods”. Every time I try and buy a book from the .com website, it asks me shift my library to .in. The one time I tried it, it (without warning) destroyed this “shared” library that we spent hard to build.

Anyway, since I have this setup, when I try to buy the kindle version of certain books from amazon.com, it says I can’t. But there’s a way around that!

Let’s say for example, you want to read the book The Ice Dragon by GRR Martin. This is what you’d do. You’d type in the book title in the search bar and hit enter.

You’d likely see the listing of the books that match said title. Then you’d probably click on the listing of your choice — in my case, that was the first.

When I chose to buy the Kindle version, I saw this dis-heartening message. “The title is not currently available for purchase.” And on top you can see that horrid banner (go away! nobody likes you.) to switch to amazon.in too.

So how does one get around that, you ask?

Do the same search, but instead of searching in the [All] section like the last time. Search for the book specifically in [Kindle Store].

Et Voila! You’ll see the book you’ve been looking for with a pretty bog button to “Buy with one click”.

I have this enabled in my account. I don’t know what happens if this hasn’t been enabled — if you do, let me know in the comments below

.You know what to do next. Click to buy and you’ll see an odd message confirming your buy — the conversion a little bit off. Don’t worry though, it’ll take the rupee equivalent of the book amount from your card.

And all is right with the world again!