What’s This?
Image: Amazon
2014-11-15 05:35:38 UTC
I'm not ashamed to admit just how excited I was when Amazon announced Unlimited this summer. I read a lot. Perhaps an unhealthy amount — at home, on the train, at restaurants and coffee shops and at the gym. I burn through books like the dystopian government in Fahrenheit 451.
Granted, I grimaced at the prospect of paying $ 10 for yet another online subscription, but given the amount of money I pump into Amazon's e-book store on a monthly basis, Unlimited actually sounded like the opportunity to save some money in the long run.
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But there's bound to be some caveats — particularly with a new service — and Kindle Unlimited has a few big ones. Actually, the issue is more about what Unlimited doesn't have. It's enough to make even the most voracious reader think twice about subscribing.
Judging a book by its cover
First, I'm not in love with the interface, but I'm also not really surprised. When launching media stores, Amazon's play has long been to simply tweak its existing interface ever so slightly, to fit it into its larger store ecosystem. It did that with Instant Video and Prime Music before it, so it's only natural that the company would also build Kindle Unlimited atop the same template.
In fact, referring to Kindle Unlimited as a service of its own is probably a bit misleading. It's more accurately something of a subset of the larger Kindle Store. At present, the easiest way of accessing Unlimited is through an ad on the Amazon homepage.
Even months after launch, it doesn't have its own spot on the front page drop down, which is perhaps a sign that the company is underplaying Kindle Unlimited in its early stages for reasons we'll get to in the next section.
But Unlimited is one of a number of categories on the Kindle e-reader's store, alongside Monthly Deals and Things to Try. That means that you can view a selection of recommended Unlimited titles. The Unlimited logo will also pop up next to eligible titles when you search on the device, but at present, there's no way of searching just within Unlimited on the reader.
As for the desktop version, the main Unlimited page looks pretty much exactly like any other page in the Kindle store. The top couple of rows are devoted to popular titles — or titles that Amazon deemed popular, since they seem to have been determined prior to the service's launch. The list includes mostly contemporary favorites like Life of Pi and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
There's also a row of recommended books, which seems to be largely based on other books you've looked at on the site, rather than your reading history — or, better yet, your GoodReads activity. For a site so driven by recommendations, one would expect Amazon to invest a bit more heavily in a stronger algorithm.
Other categories abound on the front page, including Editors' Picks, Short Reads and an Author Spotlight — Philip K. Dick, in my case. Fair enough, Amazon, fair enough. There's also a module for Books With Narration — the audiobook element that the company was referring to in its launch material. If the book you pick has narration, you can listen though the company's myriad apps or through Audible's offerings.
Click on a book you like and you'll get the standard Amazon book page, along with an added "Read for Free" button, just above the option for actually buying the book (you can still do that too, naturally). Once purchased, the book will make the standard trip to your Amazon cloud for downloading across devices.
A minor nit, perhaps, but one of the issues with not having a walled off Unlimited store is that when you're navigating around, Amazon regularly bumps the search to the standard Kindle search, so you'll mostly be looking at paid titles.
You can access the list of the books you're reading through the existing Manage Your Content and Devices page — not exactly the most elegant solution. Books that were downloaded from Unlimited will be identified as such. Strangely, from here you can "return" the book, though as Amazon notes in the fine print, the books don't actually have a due date.
The limits of Unlimited
On the surface, giving users access to 600,000 titles is a lot, no question. That's like libraries and libraries of glorious electronic textual vessels to new windows of imagination. The great Library of Alexandria had around 500,000 scrolls and people are still making a big deal about it to this day. Not surprisingly, however, the 600,000 launch titles contained herein are hardly the sum of human knowledge.
The service certainly has its share of compelling window displays, with blockbuster titles like the Hunger Games and Harry Potter cunningly assembled out front to draw you in. And hey, if haven't read any Michael Lewis yet, his back catalog is worth a couple months' subscription alone. Seriously, people, have you even read Moneyball? It's wonderful.
Go a bit deeper, however, and things get a bit spottier. A quick breakdown of results from a selection of my favorite authors chosen somewhat at random:
Philip Roth: A few foreign language books with no immediate discernible connection to the Goodbye Columbus author.
Joan Didion: Apparently there's a reference to her in some collection of quotations from screenwriters.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Tricky Amazon brings up David Copperfield, The Picture of Dorian Gray and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to cover up its complete lack of selections by the Colombian godfather of magical realism.
And, well, you get the picture. Oh, and speaking of all of the aforementioned literary classics that popped up in the Marquez search, they're all also free to Kindle users without an Unlimited subscription, so don't let your inability to spend another $ 10 a month inhibit your Dickensian literary aspirations.
Rather than just shooting in the dark, I decided to try again — this time letting Amazon guide my hand a bit. Wonder Boys is on the front page, and I quite like Michael Chabon's work, so let's see where that takes us. Four titles in all — not bad, but hardly a cross-section of Chabon's best works. A Chabon bookshelf without a copy of Kavalier and Clay is like a day without sunshine.
Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani
Where Amazon is lacking free options, it happily recommends additional books you can purchase. This is Amazon we're talking about here. The company has managed to get me to buy iPhone cases while shopping for pet food. If that's not the dream of American capitalism in full bloom, I don't know what is.
OK, so what about non-fiction? I'm glad you asked. I've been reading a lot of it lately. Indulge, for a moment, my recent World War II kick by searching for Winston Churchill. Pages and pages of stuff there. Unfortunately, however, we're not talking about those award-winning biographies like The Last Lion, instead, you get a lot of titles like Winston Churchill: Quotes & Facts — books that would have otherwise cost you under $ 3.
It's a bit frustrating sometimes. Remember when Netflix first launched its streaming service back when people couldn’t bare getting rid of their DVDs yet? It's a lot like that. Some marquee titles aside, once you really start scratching the surface, you often come up with scraps.
But in much the same way that spending $ 9 a month for a Netflix streaming account has directly impacted many of our personal viewing habits (and rarely, let's be honest, for the better), there's a pretty good chance the $ 10 Amazon is asking will also have a measurable influence on what you read.
Searching for titles through the service involves a lot of mumbling softly to yourself, "close enough, I guess." And for really passionate readers, it will also mean that, in the same way that we still supplement our Netflix accounts with the occasional iTunes/Google Play movie rental, you're still going to have to buy the books you really want to read, much to Amazon's delight, no doubt.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos prepares to unveil the Fire phone at an event in Seattle on June 18, 2014.
Image: Mashable, Christina Ascani
The source of Kindle Unlimited's lack of depth is an unsurprising one. It's the same issue that has plagued music and movie streaming service since the dawn of such things: An inability to attract content partners. As has been noted, the "big five" publishers — Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster — aren't present here. That's a bit like launching a music service without Universal, Sony and Warner on board.
And let's be honest, even with the big publishers on board, don't expect to ever get free access to the latest best sellers. For much of the same reason that movies don’t go straight from the theater to Netflix, publishers are likely going to want a reasonably-sized window in which to sell their wares at retail before offering them up for free.
Wrap up
A simple search confirms that Unlimited isn't quite the no-brainer it seemed at first. As is often the case with nascent media stores, the service's appeal is severely hampered by selection. Unlimited could also benefit a good deal from spinning off a bit more from the larger Kindle Store — though, granted, that might make it a bit harder for the big Amazon upsell.
So, where do we stand on that $ 10 a month? Honestly, it's still a good deal for the right person — the voracious reader who can make due with a selection that isn't necessarily the cream of the crop.
The good news is that Amazon is offering a free 30-day trial, which should provide ample time to figure out if it's worth scheduling yet another reoccurring $ 10 monthly payment on the old Visa. Be forewarned, though, it's on you to cancel, as Amazon will automatically renew at the end of the trial period.
Kindle Unlimited
The Good
Unlimited reading for $ 10 a month • Cross-platform use • Marquee titles like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games
The Bad
Limited selection • No standalone Unlimited store
The Bottom Line
Kindle Unlimited is a promising offering that has the potential to further upend book publishing — if only if could get some more books.
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Topics: amazon, Apps and Software, kindle, Kindle Unlimited, Mobile, Tech
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