After nearly seven years of being the market share leader in the e-reading world, Amazon has finally thrown its hat in the ring in the “Netflix for books” business, which already faces stiff competition from the likes of Oyster and Scribd. Amazon’s latest book service is called Kindle Unlimited, and it launched yesterday amid fanfare, skepticism, and controversy .
So first things first: what is Kindle Unlimited, and why should you care? It’s an e-book subscription service, wherein the customer has access to over 600,000 titles, and thousands of audiobooks. These can be accessed either on your Amazon devices (like the Kindle or Kindle Fire), as well as on any other device with a Kindle app. Like Netflix, you do not directly purchased any digital books, but rather have full access for as long as you are a paying member.
So apart from the Amazon brand, how does Kindle Unlimited stack up against the competition? According to their respective websites, Oyster offers over 500,000 titles, about 100,000 or so short of Kindle Unlimited’s list of books, and Scribd offers just 400,000 titles. Neither of these alternatives can offer any audiobooks, so already Amazon seems to have a bit of a lead in that department. The other way in which Kindle Unlimited has a lead is in the Kindle e-reading device itself. Oyster and Scribd don’t have their own devices, and as such, you can’t expect to be able to read on a black and white e-ink reader. However, if you’re someone who reads on a tablet anyway, this shouldn’t be a problem for you.
The launch of Kindle Unlimited comes on the heels of a big feud between Amazon and Hachette, one of the big five publishers. While the exact details of the feud aren’t known, we know the issue revolves around the pricing of e-books–with the assumption being that Hachette is in favor of higher prices, while Amazon is in favor of lower prices.
Potentially related to the feud is the fact that Kindle Unlimited is very much lacking books from all five of the big five publishers, The New York Times points out :
HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster, for example, are not participating, representatives from the three companies confirmed.
Penguin Random House and Macmillan declined to comment, but a search on Amazon suggests that they are not making their books available.
While the absence of the biggest publishers is a bit disheartening, given that Kindle Unlimited is less than a week old, 600,000 titles is nothing to sneeze at, and given time, these issues may even eventually work themselves out.
You can start a free trial of Kindle Unlimited for 30 days. Check it out on their site. Thoughts on the service? Is this something to look forward to or is it too much of a blow that none of the five major publishers are on board? Let your voice be heard below.