Sharing the Google Family Library is a disaster, but only if you make the same mistakes I did
Google’s family sharing has considerable advantages: a subscription for Youtube and Youtube Music without ads, separate user libraries for Youtube TV (with adsâ¦), and more at a shared cost. Up to five people in total can use Play Pass and Stadia to play games, share a Google One storage bank, and you can even send yourself force reminders using the Google Assistant like “Hey Google, remind you. Aiden to clean his room! â.
Today, however, I want to focus on one aspect of Family Sharing that isn’t as straightforward depending on how you use it – the Family Library. With it, you can share qualifying digital purchases in the form of games, apps, movies, TV shows, and books with your family group at no additional cost. A family-friendly payment method is also shared among all of you for purchases, and kids even have to ask permission before âswipingâ for new items, which is fantastic.
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Unfortunately for me, I have done things very badly over the past few years. Launched in 2016, the Family Library came right after my son was born, and Family Link came out a year later. Naturally, I didn’t rush to create a Google account for him to store all of his Paddington and Dr. Seuss audiobooks to put him to sleep every night – I just bought them with my own account.
Now that he has his own Google Account and his own little Lenovo Chromebook Duet with Family Link, I’ve been thinking about keeping all of his books, movies, and more separate for a number of reasons. I want to give him a sense of responsibility for delivering his own content without him having to see anything I’m buying that is not suitable for his age – fiction novels, PG-13 movies, etc., I wanted to stop receiving recommendations for children’s content in my apps, and I wanted to stop having to manually remove items from one’s devices after purchasing them for myself, because Family Sharing automatically adds new content to accounts of all family members. There’s a setting in the Family section of the Play Store that lets you manually add and remove content, but I’ll talk about that later.
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Another problem is that I bought things on the wrong account during my many years of managing Google accounts. As I got older I found that it was more important for me to keep things separate for each account based on the goal or topic so that I could be more productive. It’s not enough just to keep Notes, Drive files and much more – now I want to do the same for Music, Books, Movies etc. I also have a crazy level of undiagnosed OCD and an obsession with organizing data (What? That’s fun!). Anyway, here’s a breakdown of how I separate the Google Account from my game development studio and my personal account.
Personal account
- Faith and Apologetics
- Entrepreneurship and productivity
- fiction
- Poetry
- Parenthood
- Inspired
- Cookbooks (when I’m not using my Nest Hub!)
- Guitar and composition
- Magic and misdirection
- Relationships and self-help
- Writing and editing
Corporate account
- Art books
- Reference Guides for Game Development
- Comics
- Developer biographies
- Strategy Guides
- Marketing
- Graphic and web design
- The psychology of creativity
- Narrative design
- Philosophy and theory of design
Hope you can now see the big divide between the two groups of content and why I like to separate them. Whatever your personal taste in books, I’m just using this as an example. I’m talking about Play Books because it’s the app I use the most in the Family Library for sharing content, but I had no idea how much of a mess it would be to do so. Yes, it’s probably my fault, but that’s not the point. I always come back to the idea that Google has not configured its services correctly to work between an individual’s work and personal figures. In this case, my work and my personal personality in addition to my son.
I understand there are licensing issues with transferring content and Family Sharing was supposed to fix this, but why can’t I verify that I’m the same person on multiple accounts? Why can’t I transfer content between a company and a personal character or even to my son without it remaining on the original account since this feature was released after I purchased content that qualifies for it? Why can’t I add my Google Workspace account to a family group?
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Before you say “Because this is a business account, not a family member,” keep in mind how integrated these types of accounts are into our personal lives. I keep using the term âpersonasâ because that’s what they are – at least to me. My business and my personal life are two halves of the same coin, not two separate coins. Maybe it’s because I’m a small business and not a corporation. Either way, I just wish the company would take these things into consideration.
So with three accounts being a complete mess, I went through and cleaned the house. Yes, I’m ashamed to admit it, but instead of leaving everything completely disorganized, I deleted the content of each library if it was no longer relevant to that account. This means that I have potentially wasted hundreds of dollars on purchases to tighten things up. Yes, you can add or remove individual content items from shared libraries, but if you purchased it on the wrong account, there is no option for you as previously discussed.
Deleting content on an account that is part of the shared library left a sample for that ebook or audiobook in the opposite account, which I found frustrating at first as I had to delete hundreds of samples, but then I found out that I really liked it because it allowed me to bookmark the content that I should decide if I will repurchase over time. Hey, better than a wishlist bookmark, since I can listen to said sample and add them to the shelves for future consideration!
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I still have to re-train Google’s recommendation algorithms in these apps by long pressing on a book to tell it I’m no longer interested in this type of content, but even though it will take a while I think it was worth it. The most frustrating part is that I had to manually delete every item from my shared library because the family group setting in the Play Store that deletes everything at the same time just didn’t work. I really think so – I have tried it on several browsers, several times. Google’s setting to stop family sharing of specific content types is completely broken!
The moral of the story is: don’t make the same mistakes I did. Buy professional books, technical guides and reference content from your professional account Buy personal books from your personal account, and instead quickly buy children’s books or audiobooks on your own account to save time or Avoid creating a Family Link account, just manage it early so your kids can digitally request your permission for new content. Once you do, it exits the family payment method and goes straight to its own library – hassle-free. Most importantly, if you have multiple accounts logged into your device, be sure to verify that you are on the correct one before making a purchase. Yes, the Play Store has a decent refund policy, but like me, you might not realize it until it’s too late.
I’m not saying shared library isn’t for anyone, I’m just saying it feels like it’s become more of a problem than a solution, depending on who you are and how you use it. Hopefully Google will someday find a way to adapt to separate content after the feature’s release if it affects their users in an unforeseen way – especially children – and that they also take into account the needs of the feature. ‘an individual in their professional and personal lives and how they can influence each other within the ecosystem of Google services. Yes, it was mostly my fault, but I still thought it was worth discussing. Let me know below if you run into any of these issues or don’t really care where your content is going, as long as you can access it!