Last Xmas I bought my mum a Kindle and put some books on it for her using my pc. I set up the account via my Amazon log in as she doesn't have a computer or email,

My brother wants to add some books and take the Kindle away on holiday with him,

Can he do this simply by connecting the Kindle to his laptop and settng up a new account or does he need to use my existing information and my pc etc?

He needs to deregister the kindle from your account and the register it to his own account. Incidentally, are the books he wants to add from Amazon? Or were they bought elsewhere? If they were not bought from Amazon the kindle could remain linked to your account and the books side loaded.

Thank you. One final question (as I'm a complete novice) what do you mean side loaded? I think he was looking online at various different sites so he might not have necessarily looked at Amazon first.

If you buy a book from Amazon you can only read it on Kindle registered to the account you bought it from. There's DRM protection that's responsible for that. There can be 2 types of books on the Kindle, bought from Amazon with DRM and your own "private" ones without DRM. If you deregister/re-register the Kindle all DRM books will be removed. Your private ones will stay. Those are the "side-loaded" that can be added/removed freely on any Kindle using USB cable and a computer.

BTW when buying from other sites than Amazon, make sure you use a compatible format, which is MOBI, PRC, or AZW. Also PDF(without DRM) is OK, but not very comfortable to read on Kindle. Don't buy EPUB, it uses another type of DRM and the format is not compatible with Kindle. It can all be overcome, but it's a bit of a hassle, that can be avoided. When buying ebooks, it's basically the world against Amazon. Amazon uses MOBI, almost everybody else uses EPUB.

The simplest way would be to continue to use your Amazon account and have him pay you for the books, that way no books will be lost from the Kindle.

As for book management Calibre is an excellent piece of software which can, among other things, convert books in non-Kindle compatible formats to .mobi files which can be viewed on the Kindle as well as the Kindle software for PC and the apps for phones and tablets.

id highly recommend calibre to anyone with a kindle. Only got mine a few weeks ago and side loading/converting books onto the kindle using it is so easy.

1. anyone who buys books on their Amazon account has the books "on that account". They can be downloaded via internet to any suitable device. Either a kindle registered to that account, or a kindle reader on desktop or tablet computer.

so you can have the same book on your home computer and kindle too! read it on both ..........

2. A kindle is like any other usb memory stick! you can transfer computer files to and from it with the connecting lead. those files which are formatted either in kindle format or as pdf are "readable" on the kindle and appear on it as books.

this is independent of Amazon. the device may be registered. or it may not be. either way you can still transfer files from a computer.

3. for other type ebooks -if public domain and not passworded - then calibre will convert them into kindle format before transferring from computer to kindle.