As a recent member of Kindle Unlimited – by the way and completely unrelated do you feel that Canadian’s and for that matter anyone not from the US gets gypped by Amazon? I mean Amazon Prime is actually quite cool … in the States. There you get Video (similar to Netflix but probably not as good) and unlimited music streaming + unlimited photo storage + free two day shipping + other things … in Canada you get unlimited photo storage and free two day shipping … big whoop! – oh well, there are other positives to living in Canada but I guess we’re never going to get our electronics and gadgets as cheaply or as quickly as they do in the States.
As a bit of a … well lets be honest as a big … geek this is somewhat depressing. In addition as a huge reader this is even more disappointing as Amazon Prime in the US has access to over 500,000 free ebooks … this isn’t even available on Amazon Prime in Canada! What is available in Canada is something called Kindle Unlimited and while at first glance it seems somewhat similar – I think they offer 250,000 ebooks – there are only 50,000 that are related to SciFi and Fantasy which is in my very biased opinion a crime! 🙂
What you might not realize until you start really using it is the list of authors available seems to be restricted to either self published authors or ones that are fairly new to the genre or writing in general. There are obviously exceptions to this – I found some good books by Arthur C. Clarke and some other older grandmasters but finding some of the newer books by authors like David Weber and John Ringo … well you’re out of luck!
Kindle Unlimited seems to be a grand experiment really as while its definitely a good way of introducing newer authors to readers, the restrictions remove some of the advantages and make me question the decision and cost of a $10/mo price point. I mean if I could read the people and books I wanted to read, this would absolutely make sense to me. While I realize that authors need to make money and get rewarded for their imagination, I’ve never been able to justify the fact that there is little to no difference in cost between ebooks and paperback books. It just doesn’t make sense and considering the volume of books I’m able to go through – well simply put I couldn’t afford the habit!
So Kindle Unlimited at the $10/mo price point for up to 10 books – like I said that actually works. It would be better if it was included in Prime versus being a separate product as now even if I wanted to take advantage of the pathetic benefits of Amazon Prime in Canada I wouldn’t want to spend another $10/mo for that also, but that’s just another gripe. However if you can’t even get the books you want then it probably doesn’t make any sense.
A bit of a pity really as I’ve found a couple of good authors that I’d like to continue following – so in that respect its worked – but I’ve also had to pay $$$ for some others that simply weren’t available and this is where it fell down for me. If they roll this out to include more titles and authors perhaps this will work, but right now Kindle Unlimited feels to me like the exact opposite – Kindle Limited!