No, they specifically say as long as the devices are registered under the same email with amazon they don’t care. Nowhere in their language do they even hint that they they care that the emails are shared by multiple people. They could have said “all devices registered to someone using their email…”. They didn’t and I’m certain they are careful about how they parse the language in replies.
If they cared they have the capacity to register each device to a specific person (and all the devices that specific person owns). They are more than capable of shutting this behavior down if they actually did care.
My guess is that they’ve worked the models and the effort put in to make it person specific is just not worth it.
ETA: You could argue the case that it’s not ethical, but it’s not stealing if it’s not prohibited by Amazon’s own policy.
This is my take, too. The gift is my choice for them, something I think will suit them. I’m not buying it to suit myself.
For me, it has nothing to do with whether I can use it without damaging it. If I were giving someone a car, I might drive it home from the dealership (because there’s no other way to get it home), but I wouldn’t take a road trip in it. Yes, even a used car.
The gift is in my possession, but it isn’t mine. As soon as I bought it with the idea that it was for someone else, in my mind it became that person’s. They don’t know they have it, but I do. Maybe they wouldn’t know I read it, but I would.
I know you need a ladder to change a high up light bulb.
I also need a ladder to get my cat out of a tree.
I buy a ladder “for you” and use it to get my cat out of the tree before giving it to you.
I think that’s tacky. It opens up the idea that I bought the ladder for me, and gave the (now useless to me) ladder to you in order to fulfill a social gifting expectation. The fact that I kept it looking nice is only to fulfill the gifting protocol of giving items that are not obviously used or dirty.
Granted, from a “legal” perspective, the book does not become the recipient’s property until it is formally given. From an internal perspective, however, I consider that item their property once I buy it for them. The delay between purchase and giving is a timing issue, and my duty is to hold the recipient’s item until the appropriate time to present the gift.
So you ignore the as-yet-ungifted ladder and what, go to the store to buy another, leaving Kitty in the tree meanwhile? Ask a neighbor to borrow one and explain why you can’t use that brand-new one they just saw you pull into your driveway with?
Most people don’t really have “get my cat out of a tree” on their to-do list though, I would think of it more as an urgent situation. If you gave me a ladder as a gift, and said you used it first for a planned chore you needed to do, I would think that was weird. But if you said that your cat was stuck up in a tree and you needed to get it down and used the ladder, then I’d be happy that you were able to use the ladder and rescue the cat, I wouldn’t think that was tacky at all. If you said that you thought about using the ladder but didn’t use it because that would be tacky, and now your cat has been stuck up in the tree for a few days, I would be really confused and worried about your cat.
But a ladder isn’t a perfect comparison, since I think most people use ladders for needed jobs, while books are for enjoyment. I’ll probably never have a situations where I’ll need to use the book I bought someone, whether for a planned chore or an emergency situation. If I use the book that I bought for someone else, it’ll be just because I want to read it.
Is it OK to read an e-book before you give it to someone?
You won’t crack the spine, or get spaghetti sauce on the pages. how would they be able to tell?
I had a character in one of my plays say that he always reads the books he gives as gifts first.
If there’s a long enough gap between when I bought the book and when I give it that I have time to read it, then I wouldn’t be able to see it as anything other than buying a book I wanted to read and then passing it off as a gift.
You go do your Christmas shopping and on the way home your car dies. You call for a tow, but it will be an hour. Using up your phone battery at this point may be unwise. Do you just sit there doing nothing because the book you just bought is intended for someone else?
IvoryTowerDenizen has already given the “official” answer, but ethically, I don’t see how this (having a shared Amazon account and, thus, shared Kindle content) is different from family members or roommates or whoever having a shared bookshelf or record collection that they all have common access to.
If you feel like that would be tacky then, that’s fine that you don’t do it. But it’s not terribly unusual to buy Christmas presents in November, and that would give the buyer a month to read a book.
Are you confusing me with someone else? I’ve already said in two posts that I don’t see a problem with reading a book before you give it to someone else. So obviously, if it was a book I was interested in, I would read it while waiting for a tow. Even if it was a book I wasn’t terribly interested in, I’d probably read it.
But 99% of the time, I won’t have a book reading emergency where I would have to read the book I bought for someone else. I would just be reading the book because I want to, and I think that’s OK, as long as the book isn’t damaged.
I’m not really into consumerism either - it’s one of the reasons Christmas is not my favorite of holidays.
However, I do believe that Christmas is a holiday to indulge in the things you wouldn’t normally do for yourself. If you’re the type of person who buys the $30 scotch, I’m going to gift you the $50 scotch. If you do $40 massages because a $300 spa day is too expensive, you get the spa day. When I bought my wife a $5 box of chocalate, it was mostly so that I could put the $250 theater tickets inside it.
So my idea of a well-stocked Christmas tree has basically one item for each person on it, but it’s a NICE item. If that item was going to be a book, it’d be a brand-new hardcover limited edition signed by the author because it’s Christmas, damn it*. If I just want to give you a book, I’m more likely to get it from a used book store, read it first, then hand it off to you in March or August for no particular reason.
*OK, I’m going a little far with that. But it won’t be a book I’ve already read if I’m giving it. Not that I’d be offended if someone gave me a book they’d already read.
Where and when has this been the case? I worked at a bookstore for a number of years, and the only books we got to take home were the ones we had purchased. This was 25 years ago, and for a national chain, so I suppose things might be different today, in a small independent bookstore…but I’d hope not. I understand that a book that I purchase may have been opened and leafed through by previous customers, but I’d expect that would be the extent of the usage on the book prior to my purchase.
IMO, the issue here has nothing to do with whether or not the book (or any other item) is “used up”; it’s a simple matter that an item* which is purchased with the specific intent to be given as a gift* should not be used by the giver prior to it being given. It’s simply a matter of ‘manners’. Now, if you and your friends have an understanding that it’s OK to do so, that’s fine; in that case, I won’t say you’re wrong. But absent such an understanding, I think it’s tacky at best.
Okay to read a used book before gifting, not a new book. A new book will in new condition, spine unbroken or creased, pages all perfectly flat. An obviously used book won’t show the reading, but a new book read once will look like exactly what you just did, a cheap cast-off.
Jeez, people actually pick out specific books for other people? This is 21st century America! What one does in THIS era is get a gift certificate for Amazon.
It’s perfectly ok to read the printed gift certificate before handing it over!
I’m just saying reading emergencies are real and happen all the time. When I think of all the times I’ve been stuck in a waiting room somewhere reading Reader’s Digest out of pure desperation, it explains how that magazine manages to exist.
I apologize for implying that you personally would not read a gift book in advance.
I reckon it depends on the type of book. I wouldn’t settle down and read a novel before giving it as a present, but those funny books that come out this time of year ( comedian tie-in type things) they are OK to flick through before gifting.
Well, you were very lucky to have been carrying around a gift at the time of the emergency. Me, when I buy gifts, I have a tendency to take them home and leave them there, rather than take them to my next checkup.
There certainly is a difference between flipping through a book to get an idea of the content before giving it (probably a good idea) and thoroughly reading a novel you know already the person will like.
In the incident that sparked this thread, the books were indeed novels. Most likely the most recent installments of a couple of series both girls have been reading. It seemed to me that the main reason the older girl was buying those particular books “for her sister” was so that she could read them herself and then give them to her sister as Christmas presents. It strikes me as a really bratty thing to do. Not that anyone cares, but the mom ended up getting the older girl to wrap them and put them under the tree, so she won’t be reading them first.
I absolutely view it as not-okay. It’s not a gift if you read it first. It’s a book you bought for you, and then gave to someone else when you finished it. I am firm in my belief that it’s selfish and shitty.
“Happy Birthday bro, I bought you this sweet shirt! I totally wore it on my first date with Susie last night, because I thought I’d look great and maybe get lucky!”
“Merry Christmas, Dad! Here’s that fly fishing rod you wanted. Works great! I used it on my trip to Montana last month.”
“Congratulations on your wedding! Here’s the KitchenAid mixer we only used a couple times. It was just sitting in our kitchen!”