One vital activity for both of us is reading, so in the past our bookshelf was constantly bursting apart. This was a conundrum – how could you apply the Lean Life philosophy to books? Well, go electronic, of course. Hence, in the past few years, we have almost always bought ebooks on the Kindle, if the title is available (and not too expensive). The only annoying thing has been that we can’t borrow books to each other, like we used to.

But some time ago we discovered a fantastic new property: Kindle Family. With a couple of button presses, we could give each other rights to our electronic bookshelves. With this, I got a nifty 60 new books to read, and Sonja’s selection expanded by a few hundred titles. Not that this is a competition, but still.

The end effect is the same as if you bought the books yourself. You can read the books as usual, but you both retain your own notes, underlinings and so on. So even if you happen to read the same book simultaneously, your Kindle will always start at the page where you left off.

It’s possible to have a maximum of two adults and four kids in one Kindle Family, so this is not suitable for your friends’ book club. In addition, a limiting factor to having a Family with your buddy can be that in a Family, you also provide access to your credit card for the other adult. In a relationship, this is perhaps not such a big issue.

Anyway, this time holiday reading came from Sonja’s bookshelf, since I immediately saw a few novels I’d wanted to read for a while. And now I didn’t have to buy them again 🙂

In addition to the Kindle, we both also use iBooks on the iPad. The iCloud Family Sharing allows you to share iTunes libraries and all apps bought within a family.