Kindle Unlimited from a reader's and writer's perspective

This past week, Amazon rolled out Kindle Unlimited.
At first glance, it looks like a reader's dream come true --- for $9.99
per month, you can read any ebook you want for free. On the other
hand, many indie writers are running scared, wondering why anyone would
buy their books if the works can now be downloaded for free. It
turns out that neither analysis is quite right. I did some poking
from the author's perspective and signed up for the free trial as a
reader, and here are my early thoughts on the program.
A reader's perspectiveAs
a reader, I suspect I'll cancel my subscription to Kindle Unlimited
after the free period ends. While Amazon brags about having
600,000 free books in the program, the truth is that these are primarily
indie authors who enrolled their books in KDP Select, plus a few
big-name authors Amazon probably paid to participate. In other
words, if you struggled to find a book to borrow using your prime
membership, you're going to struggle even more to find enough books to
make your $10 a month worthwhile.
Plus, Kindle Unlimited
isn't truly unlimited. I started poking through all of the authors
whose books I wanted to read, finding that about a quarter of them had
books enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. (Most of my books and all of
Aimee's books are there, in case you're curious.) So that I
wouldn't have to repeat the legwork, I went ahead and downloaded all of
the ones I was at all interested in...until Amazon told me I'd hit my 10
book limit. Yep, that's right, their book limit is lower than
that of the public library --- nowhere near unlimited. However,
from a practical standpoint, you can always return a book and borrow a
new one, so you could keep reading using Kindle Unlimited for as long as
you wanted.
What would it take to
keep me subscribed? If Amazon found a way to get the big
publishers and all indie authors on board and had every kindle ebook
enrolled in the program, so I really could read whatever I want for $10
per month, I would totally pay for it. I doubt that's going to
happen anytime soon.
A writer's perspective

Okay, moving on to the writer's point of view. Although I was slightly leery of the Kindle Owner's Lending Library
when it first came about, I've since grown to love the program (which
Kindle Unlimited seems to be piggy-backing on). Every time a
reader borrows one of my books using their prime membership, I get a
chunk of the fund Amazon has set aside to remunerate authors, and the
chunk is pretty hefty. Over the last year, borrow income has
averaged $2.27 per book for me, bringing in a whopping $2,756 ---
nothing to sneeze at! Now, authors who charge a lot more for their
books are probably less keen, since if your book costs more than $3.27
(with no photos to lower the net amount that goes to authors), you'll
lose money on a borrow rather than a buy. However, I suspect that
some borrowers will still go on to buy your book so they can keep it for
a reread, which evens things out. Meanwhile, for those of us who
price our books to sell, we get quite a bit more from a borrow than a
buy.
Although I'll have to
wait until I see my first sales report to confirm this, everything I've
read so far suggests that Amazon plans to treat borrows using Kindle
Unlimited the same way as borrows using Amazon Prime. The only
difference is that they won't pay authors until a reader has consumed at
least 10% of the book, a way of preventing kindle stuffing from
breaking Amazon's bank. So, from a writer's standpoint, the only
concern is to keep an eye on Amazon's global fund to make sure the
borrow income per book doesn't decline, something I was concerned about
at first, but am less worried about now that the fund has been in
operation for years and has only dropped below $2 per book once in the
last twelve months.
It's a good thing that
Kindle Unlimited looks like it won't hurt indie authors since we don't
really have a choice in the matter. If we want to keep the
benefits of KDP Select, our books are automatically enrolled (although
we have the option of unenrolling right now rather than waiting until
the end of our usual 90-day contract if we're scared of Kindle
Unlimited). I'll try to remember to post a followup in a few
months once the dust settles and the data is in.