How to protect your Apple Books e-books while you are alive
There is no way to name a beneficiary or successor on an Apple Books account. While the account holder is alive, Apple allows family pooling.
Because Apple's terms forfeit Apple Books e-books at death, anything preserved is moved or used while the account holder is alive. There is no way to name a beneficiary or successor on an Apple Books account. While the account holder is alive, Apple allows family pooling.
How to protect your Apple Books e-books
Naming who acts after a death
- Designation
There is no way to name who receives a purchased Apple Books library. The Apple Account's Legacy Contact reaches iCloud data, and Apple lists purchased content such as movies, music and books among the data a Legacy Contact cannot access.1
What Apple Inc.'s terms say about sharing and transfers1
- Family plans and household sharing
With Family Sharing, the organizer and up to five other family members share access to Apple services and content. With Purchase Sharing on, everyone in the group gets access to the apps, music, movies, TV shows and books that family members buy.2, 3
Apple lists "Books from the Book Store in Apple Books" among the shareable content types. Purchases a member has hidden and items no longer available in the Books Store cannot be shared, and all members must use the same Apple Account country or region.4
Books and audiobooks are hidden and unhidden together, and family members do not see a hidden item unless they downloaded it first. Hiding a title does not erase its record, which stays in the purchase history.5
Family Sharing is lifetime access, not a transfer of ownership. When a member leaves or is removed, the remaining members may no longer be able to access that member's Content, including Content acquired with the Organizer's payment method.3
If the purchaser of shared content leaves a family group, the group loses access to that content, and each member keeps only the titles bought under their own Apple Account.6
Sources6
- 1.Data that a Legacy Contact can access
- 2.How Family Sharing works
- 3.Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions, Last Updated September 14, 2026
- 4.What types of content can I share with my family
- 5.Hide and unhide music, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, and books
- 6.Leave or remove a member from a Family Sharing group
Should you save your passwords for your family?
Some people store account passwords so a family member can sign in later. The practice has three practical limits:
- Two-factor authentication often blocks it. Most accounts require a second factor — a code sent to a phone, an authenticator app, a passkey, or a physical key. A saved password alone frequently does not grant access, and the recovery codes that would are easy to lose or let go stale.
- It usually conflicts with the platform's terms. Most operators prohibit account sharing and signing in as another person, including after a death. Stored credentials are not the operator's recognized access path, and using them can violate the terms of service.
- Operators provide other paths. Where an operator offers a designation tool — Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, a beneficiary designation — that mechanism grants access the operator recognizes. A password manager's own emergency-access or legacy feature passes credentials through a controlled process. Digital assets named in a will or trust give a fiduciary authority under each state's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA).
Sources
Data sourced from Apple Inc. primary sources (13 pages reviewed). How we research.
Apple Books customer support
Apple Support
Phone
Website
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