Hi all. Just wondering if anyone has taken up Amazon’s offer of the Kindle Unlimited
The bumpf states you get unlimited books for $13+ a month. Some months I would spend way more than that, others not so much. It would probably work out monetarily for me.
My understanding is that one does not keep those books for ever.
I am interested if anyone has any thoughts pro or can?
My first con thought is I don’t really like signing up to open ended things. Some of them can be quite hard to get out of.
Tried it when it came out. There were a few big “loss leader” things like the Harry Potter and Jack Reacher series, but nearly all of the books available for “unlimited” were self-published crap. By the second month couldn’t find anything of quality to read and cancelled.
It might be better now, but before paying, I’d check the last dozen or so books you read and see how many of them are available on unlimited. That’s going to be a pretty good indicator of your odds going forward.
I do agree with Timewinder; I was ready to drop it until I discovered the foreign language section. 382 titles as Gaeilge? This is going to take a while!
Somehow I had also missed out on the fact that they have periodicals. So far Saveur is the only one I really like, but there are new ones every month.
Thanks very much Timewinder and Trucelt. I had missed that the “unlimited” part only relates to numbers, but that the types of books are actually limited.
I do it periodically. Sometimes I’ll go through an entire series of books, and when the books are $5 each (and are one included in the Unlimited), it’ll pay to do a month of Unlimited. And yes, you can do it for a month, then cancel it and pick it up again at any time.
Kindle Unlimited is easy proof of Sturgeon’s Law. There’s some reasonably good stuff on there. There’s also a ton of dross, and the way it’s arranged makes it very hard at times to find something that looks interesting to try. That said, it only takes a couple books a month to justify the price.
A few good titles, the rest dreck. I read non-fiction, maybe it wasn’t so bad in other categories. Scribd is better, but now they have stopped their unlimited books offering. Still a fair amount of free-anytime titles.
phall0106 - the option of in and out had not occurred to me. Are they good about stopping the charge immediately? I have had other occasions where it has taken some time.
Asterion, that is what I was wondering, if I only get say three books a month with it, it has paid for itself.
seal_cleaner - thanks I will have a look at Scribd.
I had no trouble canceling. Most of the stuff is bad, and sells for a couple of dollars. It’s been about a year since I looked at the selection, so maybe it’s improved. Once you cancel, your unlimited books are removed from your kindle.
It’s still almost impossible (in my experience) to find any Gold amongst the Dross.
I’d hold out until the next time you want to read a book and it’s actually on Unlimited, then just get your free trial to read that, and see if you can find anything else afterwards.
As others have said it’s trivially easy to cancel.
I take the membership on an On-Off basis. So before I decide to get in for a month, i already have a list of about 7-10 books I want to check out. Of course, I ensure that each of these are available on Kindle Unlimited. It is easy to run those checks as you can find the KU button on the Book detail pages.
Tbh, I have never read more than 3 books in a month but the reason I have a list of 7-10 books is because I don’t want to find myself out of options if I hate a few of them once I get started.
Throwing my hat in to agree with everyone else–too much chaff and not enough wheat. It’s easy enough to cancel so if you see two or three books on there that you want to read in the next month sign up. You can cancel when you run out, easy peasy.
I’ve been using Kindle Unlimited for about a year. For me, it’s worth the money since I read WAY more than most people (usually 200-300 books a year). But for virtually anyone else, the extremely limited selection would, IMHO, be a deal-killer.
On the nights I need to turn my brain off (as in, not get entrenched in something literary and gripping), I read really stupid trivia and “true ghost story” books. I def. get my money’s worth from Unlimited, as I can go through 10-15 dumbass books a month (and spend about $250 a month on good books).
Many of these books are, to put it kindly, are indifferently edited
And, yes, it works like a lending library. You can have so many at a time and have to return a title to get a new request.
You would be better off subscribing to something like bookbub.com or freebooksy.com. You give them your genres and they find free or very low-priced books and send you a daily email with them. I know I have 500+ books on the cloud since I got my first Kindle. I’ve probably paid for less than 10% of them, and those were because the free book that I read interested me enough to buy other books from that author.
Prime book-a-month and Unlimited have some overlap, but not total. There are books out there that are Prime only. There might be some that are Unlimited only, but I doubt it.
I tried some of the other free book companies but did not like the interface (page scrolls down, very easy to overshoot the next page, Kindle Unlimited books scroll like a book does and moves with just a touch) I like Kindle Unlimited, I have found books I have liked that I would not have paid to read. I also pay for some books if it something I really want to read.
I did find the Kindle books not easy for things like travel books that I like to flip around in and of course there is no easy way (yet) to go to a table of contents and then jump to that section.
Just wondering if anyone has taken up Amazon’s offer of the Kindle Unlimited
