What happens to my Amazon account — Kindle books, Prime, everything?
Amazon will close a deceased customer's account for an authorized representative of the estate, and
its own help page is unusually direct about the consequence: closing it deletes everything, including
purchased content. Per Amazon's Bereavement Support page: "we are only able to share account
information or take actions in relation to an account when the request comes from the authorized
person of the customer's estate." If the requestor doesn't have the account login, Amazon asks for "a
copy of the death certificate, official certified documentation showing that you are the authorized
person to access the account, a valid photographic ID," and the account's associated email address
(or enough order/charge information to locate it if the email isn't known).
Source: Amazon Bereavement Support, retrieved via Wayback Machine snapshot dated 22 January
2025
(Amazon's live help pages actively blocked every direct automated fetch attempt in this research
pass, including a browser-user-agent curl request and a rendering fetch tool; this is the most
recent copy we could actually read.)
The critical line, worth reading twice if you have a large Kindle library: "Once the account is closed all of the products and services accessed through that account will no longer be available across any Amazon sites globally. These products and services include any content such as photos, music, Prime, and books that will also be deleted." Amazon does not describe any mechanism for transferring a Kindle library, Prime membership, or Amazon Photos to another account — closure is final and content-destructive, not a handoff.
What we could not verify: whether Amazon's policy or process has changed since the January 2025 snapshot we relied on, since Amazon's current live page would not load for us in this pass. Treat the quotes above as accurate as of that date, not necessarily today.
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