Amazon’s new Kindle Unlimited service, which is basically their attempt to do Netflix for ebooks as far as I can tell, has been getting a lot of attention in the publishing world. Reactions, from what I’ve seen so far, are quite mixed. (Mr. Scalzi, for example, has an interesting writeup on the topic over here.) So here’s mine.
With my reader hat on, I’m feeling right now like this service won’t be useful to me, since it doesn’t really address how I interact with ebooks. If there’s a book I want to read that I don’t want to put down money for up front, I already have a way to address that: the Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System, both of which are very friendly to ebook checkouts. Granted, this doesn’t always work, since there are some books that these two systems might not actually have and which I could in theory immediately grab via Kindle Unlimited if I were so inclined.
But here’s the thing. If there’s a book I want to read ASAP, chances are very high that it’s by an author who’s already on my buy list. In which case, if I want it, I’ll be buying it. If it’s not an author I know already, chances are equally high that said book is competing with the several hundred other things on my To Read list, and it’ll come off the queue when I get to it. If the library systems don’t have it, I can generally wait till they do.
And if I happen to become unemployed again, the service becomes even more superfluous. $9.99 a month isn’t much if you have a regular, well-paying job. But if you don’t, every new dollar adds up. And this would be one of the first expenses I’d drop if I happened to be a subscriber who suddenly lost her job.
Really, though, when you get right down to it, I’m perfectly happy to use the library for books I’m not sure I want to buy yet. And if it becomes a question of “who gets my money”, I’d just as soon donate to the library rather than blow $9.99 a month for access to books I will most likely not actually read in any given month.
Because I mean, seriously, people, there are currently over 1,200 titles on my Goodreads To Read shelf. Many of which I already own, and most of the rest of which I can grab from the library when necessary. I’m not seeing much need to blow $9.99 a month on top of that to get access to those books via some other mechanism.
Meanwhile, with my author hat on, my reactions are mixed. Whether my titles with Carina show up on this service is beyond my control. If Harlequin elects to deploy Carina titles to the service, it’s certainly possible that I might get a few extra pennies I might not otherwise get, which is fine. (Though at the level at which I currently operate, yeah, a few extra pennies would be what I’d have to expect here.)
And as y’all know, since I’m not publishing Faerie Blood exclusively with Amazon, that title certainly won’t be getting out there. So in regards to my self-published stuff, Kindle Unlimited isn’t a benefit to me at all.
How about y’all? Anybody out there going to sign up for this thing, as a writer OR a reader?
Comments
8 responses to “Regarding Kindle Unlimited”
I’m right there with you, speaking as someone who worked as a reference librarian for sixteen years. As an author, I don’t believe in monopolies, full stop. I like Amazon, I appreciate what it’s done for my ability to publish my works, but give them a monopoly on them? Hell, no.
Yeah, I was just telling a friend a couple days ago that say what you will about a lot of the shit Amazon’s pulled, they are the main reason it’s so easy for an indie author to publish stuff now. I have to give them props for that.
But I don’t want to put all my eggs in their basket, either.
I’m with you. As a reader, I’m a library user, as an author, exclusivity is very much *not* my thing.
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As a particularly voracious reader, and one who prefers ebooks to paper for a number of reasons, I find the idea of these services quite compelling. I currently subscribe to Oyster (I took advantage of their free month offer in mid-June, and was just recently billed for the first month after that). In my first month using the service, I read 24 books there, none of which were available among the very limited selection of ebooks provided by my local library (which is heavy on romance and light on most everything else, including speculative fiction).
I would have been able to read only a fraction of these 24 books, at best, if I were to read only those I wanted and could afford to purchase (depending on the book and the publisher, a $9.99/month budget might not even purchase one, and typically at most two). Granted, I wouldn’t necessarily have gone out of my way to read many of these specific books; the ease of their availability compared to others moved them to the top of my stack.
I read enough books that it’s hard sometimes to have sufficient ones on hand; a subscription service resolves that nicely, then, since sometimes I care less about having a specific book to read as much as I do having a reliable supply coming. Admittedly, 24 books/month was higher than usual, but even a more typical month’s reading for me would be at least half that, so a subscription model works well for my particular reading habit.
Even if I were to give up my preference for ebooks over paper, and used the library for more of my reading, I’d still be faced with the quite limited selection at my two nearest branches, and I’d be using my car or public transportation to get there and back. I likely wouldn’t check out 12-24 at a time, so I’d make at least a couple of trips each month. I probably wouldn’t spend $9.99/month on gas, auto wear and tear, and/or bus fares, but it would be a non-zero amount.
I’d prefer to use a Kindle-based service like Amazon’s to Oyster’s app-only model. When I can, I prefer to read on my Kindle Paperwhite as opposed to using an app on my tablet. I find the former much easier on my eyes, and, moreover, the Oyster app has extremely limited functionality in comparison to the Kindle (and even to the Kindle app). There’s no highlighting in Oyster’s app, no dictionary, no easy way to get to a specific point in a book, etc.
Unfortunately, Kindle Unlimited is missing two of the major publishers, at least for now, that Oyster includes. Of the 24 books I read last month on Oyster, for example, fewer than half of those were available on Kindle Unlimited. For the moment I’ll likely stick with Oyster, but should Amazon ink deals with the additional publishers, I’ll almost certainly switch then.
Thank you very much for such a great, detailed response! I can definitely see how a book subscription service can be useful if the selection for someone’s local libraries is poor. And I’m sorry to hear your local libraries aren’t so well stocked, that’s a bummer.
I’m aware of Oyster existing–Smashwords deploys out to them. But you’re the first person I’ve heard of actually using it! Thanks for giving your input on their app vs. Kindle functionality, too.
I buy anything I like, or think I’ll like. And as you said, there are libraries.
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