Do not know what to make of it. Is it a way to slowly move away from Prime? $9 a month seems a bit high. Ehhhh.
I am quite wary of Kindle Unlimited. Although I expect Amazon to keep the payout rate for borrows thru both KU and Prime around $2 as they have in the past, I don't see how they can maintain that level of payout over the long run and still make money. Of course, I am not Amazon, nor can I tell what they have up their sleeves. I will just have to wait and see, like everyone else.
I do know that if the payout rate per borrow drops to the point that overall I lose money, I'll pull my books out.
Ryk
(I am now returning to my dungeon.)
I am a bit skeptical on the Kindle Unlimited. Bought the first 11 on kindle, don't see why I should stop
I bought 1-6 I think, borrowed #7, then returned to buying them. There are quite a few limits on the borrow thing. We only have one actual kindle here, mostly I use my android phone or my iPad, and borrows don't work there. Plus, it is pretty hard to go back and re-read older content. I was satisfied with what Ryk said, that it got him about the same amount of money, but I'll probably buy the one in the middle after he puts out #15.
Ironically, I came across an Amazon authors forum post asking about how Kindle unlimited works. I was going to give my best guess but someone already beat me to, link. Prime probably works the same way, though since the cost for Prime is actually paying for more than one service, each of those services probably get their own pools, each taking a fraction of the prime membership cost.
Cost per month works for me as I read a fair number of ebooks a month (about 1 every 1-3 days), the cost of which is significantly higher than
@Ryk: I don't think you have to worry too much about price drops. There aren't many people that have the time or inclination to read enough books to significantly drop the payout. The link gives a reasonable assumption of 4-5 ebooks read on average a month and you'd only need to read 2-4 qualifying ebooks a month to make it worthwhile. As the link notes, an average of 5 ebooks is enough for the payout to be around $2.00 a book. Double the number of books read on average and the payout drops to $1.00 a book. Of course, you also probably have a fair percentage of people paying for Kindle Unlimited that aren't actually getting their money worth and that probably benefits the authors.
Then again, it might simply be that the money is broken up by user rather than a pool. Though I'm thinking the payout per book would vary much more between authors in that case.
