Amazon Kindle devices are more popular than ever. They provide access to a vast number of books available for a fraction of the cost of a physical copy. And ebooks result in far fewer dead trees, which is a good thing. Entertainment subscription services have skyrocketed in popularity since 2020. People are less concerned with owning their media outright and are increasingly numb to DRM issues. Therefore, you'd expect a subscription service like Kindle Unlimited to be awesome. It's the best of both worlds, right? But Amazon's promise of over a million ebooks for amazon ebooks just $9.99/month isn't necessarily worth it. Here are some reasons reviewing why. Amazon likes to trumpet that Kindle Unlimited has more than one million books available for subscribers to read. And while that figure is accurate, you'll rarely find any bestsellers or popular books on the list. None of the major publishing houses have made their books available on Kindle Unlimited, at least in the States. This post has been done with GSA Content Generator DEMO.
In the UK and Australia, HarperCollins had admittedly made a small section of its backlist available. But in Kindle Unlimited's biggest market, there's no Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, or Simon & Schuster (acquired now by Penguin). If you have a favorite author, there's a good chance their work is published by one of these "Big Four," formerly the Big Five, which together fuel approximately 60% of American book sales. There are roughly 1.5 million books available on Kindle Unlimited. Of those, at least 1.3 million books are Amazon Exclusives. This means they're not available for sale anywhere else; in other words, ebook they're all self-published. That leaves only a narrow minority of non-exclusive books. That's not to say you won't find great titles available on Kindle Unlimited, but you won't have many popular books to choose from. A large portion of these are also self-published, but some are likely to be from small publishing houses. One of the reasons to buy a Kindle is to read more from your favorite, amazon ebooks most popular authors.
And ebook while there's nothing inherently wrong with self-published books and success stories like Twilight and The Martian show, there are some great books to be found, and the lack of many books from popular mainstream authors is a problem. Most people don't have the time or the interest to dig through the heap to try and find the next The Martian. You probably want to know that the books you're reading are well-written, properly edited, and entertaining. The other side of this is that even if you love reading indie titles, you've probably got a few major authors whose work you want to read too. For most people, Kindle Unlimited simply can't replace buying books. If you want to pick up the latest George R.R. Martin or Bill Bryson titles, you'll have to buy them in addition to your Kindle Unlimited subscription. This means that the subscription won't be worth it for the average, mainstream reader.
Although $9.99/month may sound pretty reasonable for all-you-can-read ebooks, it's actually quite expensive when you consider the price of the titles available. The vast majority of self-published books on Amazon sell for less than $5. Many are less than $3, and some are even less than $1. This means that to make the $10 subscription price worth it, you will need to read quite a few books a month. If you only read the most expensive titles you can find, reading two books a month will see you saving some money, but you'll most likely have to read three or four to make a saving. While plenty of readers can get through a book a week without any hassle, the temptation to read non-Unlimited books is going to be high. Looking at the selection and the prices, it's hard to see many people being well-served by a Kindle Unlimited subscription. If you like self-published books, you can easily pick up two or three a month for less than Unlimited costs, without the recurring payments.