Kindle Unlimited!

rw-bg-nonmember._V348792836_So by now I’m sure you’ve all heard about Kindle Unlimited–Amazon’s new all-you-can-eat book subscription service! If you haven’t you can check it out here, and also sign up for a free 30 day trial! I am personally extremely excited about this. I’ve wanted an ebook subscription service since about the time ebooks were invented, and one of my biggest disappointments in Amazon Prime was the stupidly limited lending program. (Only one book a month? I mean seriously, who reads only one book a month?)

The service is priced at $9.99/month, which math smart people have worked out to be $120/year. That’s a bit higher than Prime and might seem like a rather daunting amount, but it’s actually fairly typical for subscription programs when compared to Netflix: $8/month and Rhapsody: $9.99/month. That’s also the price of about three ebooks purchased at $2.99, one DVD (if it’s not a hot new release or a Blueray) and about the minimum you’ll spend if you eat out at a (cheap) restaurant.

In a rather unflattering article by Huffington Post, Kindle Unlimited was described as “a glorified library card.” The author maintains that Amazon’s 600,000 title library is offered for free by public libraries and their companion ebook lending services across the country. But such an assertion only leads me to wonder if the authors at Huffington Post have never experienced libraries outside of cities such as New York and Los Angelos. My local library, for example, never even bought the Hunger Games, and the waiting list on the ebooks is so incredibly long that you could get them used at Goodwill before your name came up on the list.

While in MN last year I was amazed and impressed by the state-wide interlibrary loan program, but even that (which enabled me to find and read many titles now out of print and otherwise impossible to obtain) pales in comparison to what Amazon is now offering. And, as anyone who’s ever compared shipping UPS vs USPS knows already, private services are more efficient and cost effect than the government every time.

So what are your thoughts on Kindle Unlimited? Are you ready to sign up or do you feel that the benefits aren’t worth the cost? Are you over the moon about this program or do you have reservations? Share your thoughts!

POSTSCRIPT: Imagine This is still in full swing! If you haven’t already, check out this morning’s post by Jordan Smith on how to take a genre you don’t like and turn it into something you do! And be sure to come back tomorrow for a dazzling interview with Coleman Luck and a giveaway of AngelFall!

Comments

Kindle Unlimited! — 2 Comments

  1. I’m not going to sign up for Unlimited just yet (I think I’ll let my Prime run out first) but I do know that, as an author, I’m very excited about it. The 600,000 books not only include those popular books that every library (except yours, apparently) has, but thousands of Indie books as well, books that aren’t found in any library other than the one in the author’s home town (and that only if the author is lucky). This means that my books (and your books, too, I’ve checked them already) are now available to those readers, and unlike with Prime, where they were limited to one book a month (as you’ve mentioned) they can read as many as they’d like. (And we do see a small payment from it, if enough people download it.) I will certainly be at least taking advantage of the free trial at some point.

  2. The first thing I did after hearing about it was check my wishlist and to-read lists, to see how many books there were included in the program. It was only a very small handful, so it isn’t really worth it for me at this point. For people who read the same number of books I do, but from the type available in the KDP Select library – a lot of contemporary fiction, I’m surmising, and probably a lot of indie – it should be great. The sort of book I was hoping for, like pricier historical nonfiction that my library doesn’t have, isn’t there.

    I use interlibrary loan pretty regularly, since I read a whole lot of out-of-print and hard-to-find books. But I still have to do it on a limited basis, since the checkout periods are about half the length of an ordinary loan and not renewable. If you take out a lot of research books on interlibrary loan you end up having to cram, which is not much fun. 🙂