What do you think of the Kindle Unlimited plan? For $10 a month, you can “rent” as many books as you want. Two questions immediately come to mind: 1) which books are available? And 2) does the book disappear from my Kindle at a certain point?
A quick scan of my Kindle purchases shows that I buy about 3-4 books per month, on average $8-9. That’s a range of $24-36 per month.
So this might be a good deal for me, depending on the answers to the above questions.
Question 1: What’s available? According to Amazon, there are 600,000 titles in the pool. Which sounds like a lot. Except, except a scan of the books I bought in the last six months, and the books on my “shopping list” shows that none of them are available in the “Kindle unlimited” plan. That’s a deal breaker for me. If I go to the library I’m willing to try something new I didn’t plan to read — but not for $10 a month.
Question 2: How long do you keep the book? According to the website, you can keep up to ten books, and return them any time to get more. That’s not bad, if you don’t care to hang on to most of your books. I’m not a big re-reader, since there’s so much I want to read. But I do like knowing a book is there when I want to refer back to it. Of course you could buy outright the books you love, or the books in a series you might need to refer back to. But then that gets you back to the question of whether this is a cost savings.
I won’t be signing up for this until all or most of Amazon’s books are available under this plan.
It seems to me Amazon is grasping at straws a bit, with their Fire phone and this new plan. I wish they were a little more focused on just selling books at reasonable prices and continuing to improve the Kindle. This feels like a gimmick, one more thing to sign up for and mindlessly pay each month. I know I’m good at signing up for things like that, and bad at canceling them.
What do you think?
