Back in June of this year, the online shopping and publishing giant, Amazon, began a new subscription-based service for e-books called “Amazon Unlimited.” The service could be described as a “Netflix for Books,” similar to websites like Oyster and Scribd, where a user pays a monthly fee to have access to a vast library of e-books, without having to individually purchase the titles they choose to download and read. The chief selling point for Amazon’s new service is that subscribers have access to “over 600,000 e-books” from Amazon’s quite extensive library.
You may be thinking, “Wow, I can access a library of over 600,000 books and not have to purchase any?! That sounds way too good to be true!”
Well, unfortunately, it may be.
In fact, as Geoffrey A. Fowler explains in his article for The Wall Street Journal, there is a significant restriction on the titles available to subscribers of this service.
Amazon is promoting that anyone who signs up for Amazon Unlimited can borrow bestsellers such as the Harry Potter series and The Hunger Games Trilogy, in addition to classics such as Jane Eyre. While that seems to imply that popular titles are among the options for subscribers, the reality is that the vast “600,000 e-book library” advertised by Amazon is mainly comprised of obscure works: fiction, romance novels, and self-help books by little known authors.
Why is the Amazon Unlimited library so limited you may ask? Well it comes down to the relationships with publishers and what they are willing to allow Amazon to loan to subscribers for free. Amazon, as a company, has a reputation of being less-than-familial with large publishers like Random House and Harper Collins, mainly due to their fears of Amazon monopolizing the publishing industry (see TV personality Stephen Colbert’s current tiff with Amazon over disputes with the news show host and comedian’s publisher, Hachette). Issues between Amazon and the industry severely limit the number of current bestsellers and classics the online company can access. On top of that, many classics such as Crime and Punishment, Tom Sawyer, and Jane Eyre are already available for free in the form of free Kindle Editions; and people who sign up for Amazon’s “Prime” service can borrow e-books for free through the company’s “Lending Library,” which would seem to compete with the Unlimited service.
As Fowler points out in his article, your tried-and-true local library also already provides you with the ability to borrow e-books for free from an often larger and more current collection of titles, and with no subscription fees whatsoever. The only downside there is that you may have to wait for a specific e-book to be “returned” before being able to download it from your library’s server.
All in all, it appears that Amazon Unlimited’s seemingly infinite library is actually finite; the same can be said for other services such as Oyster and Scribd. As of right now, your local library may be a better option than a paid subscription service.