It’s been a surprise to me. (Full disclosure: I joined to gauge how our new Air Fryer cookbooks would work as digital books – see here for more on that).

My preconceived notion was that it would be full of books that I wouldn’t want to read – romance, fantasy, thrillers – that type of genre fiction just isn’t my jam. There is a lot of that stuff on there, true, but it’s not the full extent of it. Considering there are millions of eBooks, thousands of audiobooks and hundreds of magazines on there, that was a misguided perception on my part.

Within 10 minutes of joining I had downloaded 5 great cookbooks, a book on the brain-gut connection that I had been eyeing off in bookstores, a handful of fiction titles that I thought would make ‘easy reads’ either for myself or my partner, and the Harry Potter series for the kids. And that was just the tiniest scratch on the surface of what’s available there.

I’m almost ashamed to say it – but the best thing: all of that was free! I signed up to the 30-day free trial to Kindle Unlimited. After that it rolls into an AU$13.99 monthly subscription, cancellable at any time. I’ve gone in with my wallet wide open and intend to keep an eye on the value longer term.

How do authors get paid in this scenario, you might wonder? (I did!)

There is no royalty payable on free books, so Amazon has come up with a system for renumeration which is based on ‘pages read’. Amazon collections a portion of subscription fees into a KU payment fund – worth USD$56.4 million in September 2024, for reference. It then calculates how many pages have been read of your downloaded book, and attributes a portion of the fund to you. It’s going to be hard to make a lot of money that way, but it does happen for very popular titles, and, if not, it’s still a useful way for authors to get your book in front of readers.

And for readers, especially voracious ones, it’s a great and affordable source of books to read.

Let us know your thoughts on Kindle Unlimited.