Amazon recently announced “Kindle Unlimited,” which is a subscription based service that grants you access to the majority of eBooks available on the Amazon store. For the incredible price of just $9.99 a month, you can have access to over 600,000 eBooks. You might imagine that this includes only self published books, but actually it also includes big names like The Hunger Games, Life of Pi and the Harry Potter series.
Essentially, Kindle Unlimited is a digital library card. You can read as many of these eBooks as you want, and will be able to do so up until you cancel your Unlimited service, at which time they will all be returned to the “library”. The charming thing is that you don’t have to drive to fetch a book, you simply download it.
On the bitter part, Amazon is now embroiled in a large power struggle with a lot of the large publishing houses, hence their books aren’t available. Writers like James Patterson and David Baldacci will not have any books available on Kindle Unlimited. Fairly speaking, Amazon is not the pioneer in this “digital library card” subscription service.
Oyster and Scribd have been on the scene for quite some time now, offering exactly the same service. My final thought about this service though relates to a service called Amazon Prime. It’s a $100 a year subscription service that has quite a few benefits, including free 48 hour delivery on all goods purchased, streaming movies, TV series and music. Prime also allows you to check out one book a month from the Kindle library. Not nearly unlimited books, but unless you’re an absolute book nut, this should be a viable option.
If however, you are in a country that doesn’t offer prime, then Kindle Unlimited is a satisfying choice for high consumption, “all you can eat” reading. If you are a “book a month” type of reader though, rather buy the book you want in your preferred format, and then you’ll have something to show for all the money you’ve spent.