If you’ve ever thought, “Man, I’m so tired of buying books one at a time. I wish I could just get a subscription for $9.99 a month and have access to all of them,” well, Amazon just made your wish come true with the announcement of its new Kindle Unlimited service.
You might think of the online merchant’s new offering as a kind of digital library membership. For a penny less than 10 smackers a month, Kindle Unlimited gives you access to roughly 600,000 titles. Read as many or as few as you’d like. Read a chapter here, a chapter there, or plow all the way through whatever books you digitally “borrow.” They’re yours to read and re-read as long as you stay subscribed. Cancel your subscription, though, and they go away.
Kindle Unlimited will also offer the ability to listen to a much smaller number (about 2,000) of audiobooks. Amazon senior vice president of Kindle, Russ Grandinetti, said in promotional press release, “With Kindle Unlimited, you won’t have to think twice before you try a new author or genre—you can just start reading and listening.”
There is one significant catch, however. Kindle Unlimited will not grant access to works from five major publishers: Hachette, HarperCollins, MacMillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster. Steven King and Dan Brown fans will need to look elsewhere. But if you’ve been itching to reread The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter series, you’re still in luck.
Amazon is not the first company to offer a digital subscription service like this one. Such companies as Oyster, Scribd and Entitle all offer variations on the same idea (with some offering access to content that’s unavailable on Kindle Unlimited and others giving you the chance to keep what you download). But given Amazon’s dominating presence in the book market, it seems likely that the behemoth retailer may quickly command more attention and subscribers than any of those relatively niche services has done so far.
Power readers may be salivating at the thought of unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of books. But it’s probably worth doing the math to figure out whether you’re really likely to spend more than $119.88 annually on books.
On a more philosophical note, I think it’s worth asking the question whether this emerging book content delivery model is a boon, a bane or something in between. Will it invite people to read books they never would have considered otherwise? Or will it perhaps increase our already fragmented attention spans even further? To put it another way, if you had unlimited access to whatever books you wanted to read, would you really read more of them?
I’ll answer that question for myself: I suspect I would likely start more books and perhaps dabble in more books. But I’m not sure I’d actually read more of them cover to cover (digitally speaking). On the other hand, my wife has taken to reading almost exclusively on our Kindle, and she’s always downloading some new book. For her, it might be a worthwhile service that actually saves us money in the long run.
I don’t think there’s a single “right” answer to my questions. That said, I think it’s indisputable that content delivery methods continue to adapt in response to our ever-shifting technological capabilities, whether we’re talking about books, music, movies or TV. Increasingly, the idea of purchasing a single hard copy of any of those media is a relic from our analog past … for better or worse.
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