Kindle Unlimited

Kay · Jul 18, 2014

I just received the email from Amazon for Kindle Unlimited. So I'm wondering . . . you pay $9.99 per month to download book after book. How will the authors who've been downloaded get paid for this?

I'm assuming you can only download 1 title at a time, but still. I get what's in this for a reader. I don't get what this will mean for authors.
I watched their 52 second video. Didn't learn anything.

ScarletWhisper · Jul 18, 2014

Maybe it's like the Kindle Select program and the author gets a higher royalty for purchased copies if they opt in for the Kindle Unlimited?

I am also curious about what this program means for authors.

veinglory · Jul 18, 2014

At this point they have deals with 4-5 non-big five publishers and have included self-pubs in select. That is not enough to tempt me.

Kay · Jul 18, 2014

veinglory said:
At this point they have deals with 4-5 non-big five publishers and have included self-pubs in select. That is not enough to tempt me.

The books they advertise as being part of the program look like big 5 books. Big name titles and authors. Hunger Games trilogy, al the Harry Potters, Lord of the Rings Trilogy just to name a few are showcased on the main page.

Hmmm, gonna have to find the fine print and go digging.

Axordil · Jul 18, 2014

Marko Kloos, in a Twitter exchanges with Jaye Wells this morning, indicated that authors would receive full ebook royalty whenever more than 10% of a title gets read by a particpant. He indicates Amazon sent him the information because his books are published by 47North (Amazon imprint) so they are automatically included.

Shadow_Ferret · Jul 18, 2014

Kay said:
I'm assuming you can only download 1 title at a time, but still.
.

I thought it was an unlimited number of books, not one at a time?

And I thought I read somewhere that authors get royalties if the reader reads 10% or more of the book?

Once! · Jul 18, 2014

Shadow_Ferret said:
And I thought I read somewhere that authors get royalties if the reader reads 10% or more of the book?

Yes, I've heard that too.

Not sure what this means yet. It may mean that we get paid less per book but we increase the number of books that are sold.

Or we could be being stitched up.

Really not sure.

girlyswot · Jul 18, 2014

It's ten at a time, but every time you finish one, you can add a new one in. Like on a library ticket. No monthly limit.

The full-royalty payment only seems to apply to Amazon imprints (and maybe the small presses, though I haven't seen details of those deals). For self-publishers it's like the Kindle Lending Library - you get a proportion of the pool of money according to the number of reads you get.

Personally, I think this will be a great deal for Amazon.

It might be a good deal for some readers, depending how much you read and what sort of books.

I think it's a bad deal for authors, especially self-published authors. You have to be in Select, which I automatically think is a bad deal, since you're giving Amazon exclusivity and thus power. But also, you don't get a fixed royalty rate (unlike the existing subscription deals such as Scribd and Oyster). There's no transparency. Amazon can set the pool at any level it likes and pay accordingly. It wants authors to think they'll be missing out if they don't sign up, but in the long run I basically think the only winners will be Amazon.

J. Tanner · Jul 18, 2014

Amazon has kept the funding for KOLL (which will include KU lends) at roughly $2.00-$2.50 every month since it was added to KDP Select. For the near future, it would seem to be a good estimate when considering whether to join KDP Select for KU access.

jari_k · Jul 18, 2014

Shadow_Ferret said:
I thought it was an unlimited number of books, not one at a time?

And I thought I read somewhere that authors get royalties if the reader reads 10% or more of the book?

Would that mean Amazon knows the percentage of each Kindle book we read?

Liosse de Velishaf · Jul 18, 2014

jari_k said:
Would that mean Amazon knows the percentage of each Kindle book we read?

The software is absolutely capable of tracking that. Whether it's legal and whether they do it, I don't know.

Personally, this sounds like a terrible deal for authors. At $9.99 a month, I could roll through a few hundred books a year. Obviously everyone has different reading speeds, but I can't see authors getting the same returns from this that they get from normal distribution.

Subscription services like Pandora and Netflix work for media that makes its money off of advertising, but books don't necessarily work that way. We can't know for sure until this goes live and authors start reporting the results, but I think this works much better for Amazon than for authors or publishers.

GeekTells · Jul 18, 2014

And Amazon continues its race to the bottom and destroying the perceived value of books.

Sheryl Nantus · Jul 18, 2014

Liosse de Velishaf said:
We can't know for sure until this goes live and authors start reporting the results, but I think this works much better for Amazon than for authors or publishers.

Well... yeah.

Amazon is not going to do anything that's not going to fill their coffers with cash.

Liosse de Velishaf · Jul 18, 2014

Sheryl Nantus said:
Well... yeah.

Amazon is not going to do anything that's not going to fill their coffers with cash.

But you'd think that considering their PR campaign for "we love authors" over the Hachette issue, they wouldn't be so blatant about screwing authors over.

shelleyo · Jul 19, 2014

For $9.99 per month you can take 10 books at a time. Once you've read 10% of the book, the author is credited for payment (which is the full royalty for publishers, and likely whatever the KOLL royalty is for self-published works--it's typically been about $2 per borrow, but that depends on how many borrows there are and how big the pot).

Only books enrolled in KDP Select are available for KU (excepting those by big publishers, which Amazon says it can put in at will as long as they pay the publisher the same as they would for a purchase), so self-published authors who don't want to participate only need to not go exclusive with Select. Authors in Select can opt-out now, in fact, because of this change.

The first 30 days of this will be the worst, because anyone can try it free and read whatever they want. Not everyone will sign up, and of those that do, at least some won't use it to its full benefit.

I think we have to wait until there are at least some paying customers of KU to get an idea how this is going to work. I'm not optimistic or pessimistic about it yet, because there's no data to work with.

AnneMarble · Jul 19, 2014

GeekTells said:
And Amazon continues its race to the bottom and destroying the perceived value of books.

Meh. Scribd and Oyster were offering the same service for months before Amazon. In fact, this time, Amazon seems to be running to catch up with them. Most people who have compared Kindle Unlimited to Scribd and Oyster would rather stick with the other services because they carry more books from the Big Five. Including Hachette of course.

I joined Scribd with a three-month trial. They offer books ranging from Hemingway to Juliet Macur's Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (still only out in hardcover). You probably won't find those on Kindle Unlimited, unless the program changes.

Anyway, I'm not sure many people are all that interested in the "Netflix for Books" idea. Oyster has been running lots of ads on Facebooks, and most of the comments have been criticial -- telling people to go to the library instead, calling the idea a rip-off, even making fun of people who subscribe and calling them stupid.

DanielaTorre · Jul 19, 2014

With the Hatchett debacle and now this, Amazon might as well have a book burning party and be done with it.

Miguelito · Jul 19, 2014

DanielaTorre said:
With the Hatchett debacle and now this, Amazon might as well have a book burning party and be done with it.

God forbid that Amazon experiments and offers the market something the market might want.

As a consumer, if they got a bigger selection of books under this all-you-can-read umbrella, I've got some real interest in this offering just like I do with Netflix, which, apparently, hasn't killed the traditional media nor has it killed off the content generators (writers, actors, directors, etc...).

So authors can sit there and hope the world stands still around them and hope this big bad thing called innovation goes away (good luck with that) or you work with publishers to make sure you get your fair share (hoping that publishers integrate your best interest with their best interest, which may not be the case).

DanielaTorre · Jul 19, 2014

Miguelito said:
God forbid that Amazon experiments and offers the market something the market might want.

As a consumer, if they got a bigger selection of books under this all-you-can-read umbrella, I've got some real interest in this offering just like I do with Netflix, which, apparently, hasn't killed the traditional media nor has it killed off the content generators (writers, actors, directors, etc...).

So authors can sit there and hope the world stands still around them and hope this big bad thing called innovation goes away (good luck with that) or you work with publishers to make sure you get your fair share (hoping that publishers integrate your best interest with their best interest, which may not be the case).

You cannot compare movies with books. Movies make millions of dollars over a couple of weeks. Actors get paid millions regardless if the movie makes any money, whereas books can take months or even years to sell millions, if at all. The author gets paid pennies on the dollar for those sales.

Innovation is not the point. Consumers don't care because it benefits them. Amazon doesn't care for the same reason. But what about the authors? Not every author sells like Rowling or King.

Miguelito · Jul 19, 2014

DanielaTorre said:
You cannot compare movies with books. Movies make millions of dollars over a couple of weeks. Actors get paid millions regardless if the movie makes any money, whereas books can take months or even years to sell millions, if at all. The author gets paid pennies on the dollar for those sales.

Innovation is not the point. Consumers don't care because it benefits them. Amazon doesn't care for the same reason. But what about the authors? Not every author sells like Rowling or King.

Last time I checked, most actors didn't get paid millions of dollars. Neither do script writers. There are also the off-screen content generators (make-up, costumes, sets, etc..) who also earn a living. They're still working, last time I checked.

Plus, authors have always gotten paid pennies on the dollar. But if it's Amazon's goal to use this subscription service to draw consumers in, hoping that the increased revenue they generate will be more than offset the increased costs of more books flowing through the program, then authors can still do okay if by volume alone.

Really, it all depends on how the terms of this service are laid out.

Sage · Jul 19, 2014

As a reader, it might be worthwhile going onto Amazon and looking at whether the types of books you're interested in reading actually have a Kindle Unlimited version. Yes, Harry Potter does. But after looking several books I've read recently--in either Kindle or hardcopy--that was the only one I found that had the Kindle Unlimited option. Not a very good recommendation for subscribing to it.

shelleyo · Jul 19, 2014

Authors getting paid pennies on the dollar, as is claimed here, is an issue to take up with publishers, not Amazon.

Also, since Amazon has to pay the full royalty on trade-published books just as if the customer purchased them, and they don't have to be exclusive to Amazon for it, I don't understand how trade-published writers think it's a terrible deal. It should increase your income, because it makes access to your book cheaper (while still paying you and the publisher the same).

It's the self-published writers that are most likely to suffer, and even that remains to be seen.

Liosse de Velishaf · Jul 19, 2014

If Amazon is indeed paying the same price it would through a standard book sale for books on Unlimited, then I guess it's okay for authors and publishers, but I wonder how Amazon expects to make money off of it. On the face of it, it seems like they would be losing money.

But I'm sure they've done something like what insurance companies do, and figured how many people are going to read how many books on the service.

I am really curious what their guesses are, though. If a user readers 10% of two books a month, aren't they already losing money? Assuming those are trade published books with the standard wholesale purchase cost.

Are they hoping to rope in people who read less than a book a month? But then why would those people use a subscription service?

Heathertruett · Jul 19, 2014

I searched most of my To Read list on Unlimited. Not one book I want to read came up as available. So it would be a waste of money for me. I'm curious to see how things unfold.

Does Oyster have a larger selection?

Sage · Jul 19, 2014

See, I thought it was probably a good deal for Amazon because I think that many people who do get the subscription will not get more than a book a month, in the future. They will when the subscription is shiny and new, but eventually they'll go to whatever their book reading habits were, and I'm sure Amazon's tracked that enough to know whether they'd make money on this. For example, I read 3-4 books a month on average, but I don't read them all on Kindle because I will always be seduced by a beautiful cover or by a convenience buy in person. Furthermore, a lot of books I read are rereads, particularly as a later book in a series comes out. There are times when I go through a Kindle-buying phase, and times when I go through a library phase, and times when I'd rather have a hardcopy in my hands. Most people don't read that many books a month, but just like many people will pay for a gym membership because for one month they'll go every day and the other 11 months of the year they'll pay the gym for the hope that they'll go again, my guess will be that some people will pay for it long after they establish that they don't use it enough to justify it.

But all of that also assumes that the books that I would want to buy on Kindle are the ones that are available for Unlimited. If you're stuck with self-published books, they're probably going to make a killing. SP'd books tend to be cheaper in the first place, so if you spend $9.99 and get 2 SP books that were $3.99 each, you're spending more that you would have. If you don't find many SP'd books you're willing to read (even for "free"), your subscription is paying for nothing. If they're paying their SP'd authors less for KU than for purchases, they make even more.

And I'm sure they thought that they'd get more big publishers on board when they started this enterprise. They've been in talks with some of the publishers lately, and I wonder if this was a major subject.

Kindle Unlimited

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