The price of Kindle Unlimited is going up to $11.99 a month

[LilyBLily]

Starting yesterday, according to the email I received. I'm hopeless at this sort of math, but isn't this a 20% increase?

It would be nice if Amazon now extended the 70% royalty to ebooks through $11.99 as well. Fat chance, I suspect.

[PaulineMRoss]

It's worse that that here in the UK. The rise is from £7.99 to £9.99, which is 25%. [Edit: it's actually only £9.49, so it's about 20%, same as the US.] Mind you, it's been the same since it first started (in 2014) so that's not bad, and with the upward creep in book prices, it's still good value, I'd say.

[She-la-te-da]

Yeah. I'll probably drop my subscription before the increase goes into effect. I think I can get enough books from the libraries and Hoopla. Being on a fixed income sucks. :\

[writeway]

I know this is an old topic but I don't see the problem. KU has been the same price for NINE years. I'm surprised it didn't go up before. Prime membership has gone up about 3 times since KU came into existence. There are companies that go up on services every year: car insurance, home insurance, cable, medical insurance, etc. So why do we expect KU to stay 9.99 a month forever???? That's not realistic. Amazon could've gone up on KU years ago and it didn't. I get on Amazon for some things but for this I understand. It's just like authors raising prices for their books. I've seen readers complain when authors go up one dollar after their books have been the same price for years. We (general we) can't support authors raising prices and criticizing readers who complain when we do then turn around and expect KU to stay 9.99 for what, forever? It's been the same price since 2014!

And I understand if people can't afford it. I'm not talking about anyone's financial issues or shaming anyone. No! I can't afford to buy all the books I want myself. I am talking about people getting ticked off by the price going up. I find it very unrealistic for us to expect KU to stay the same price forever when everything else is going up.

Most KU subscribers don't care because it's the only viable way for them to get books. I am a KU subscriber. I still save FAR more money with KU than I do buying books no matter the increase. I'm not going to go back to paying $100 or more a month for books just because KU is going up 2 dollars. And many KU subscribers feel the same. For most of us, KU is the only viable way to read books without going broke. Or broker. lol. What are the options? Just reading free books or Kobo Plus, please. No, it doesn't halfway compare to KU. Yeah, you can do libraries but KU readers love the authors in the program so we stick with the authors we can read. Most aren't interested in going to other places and abandoning authors we enjoy.

I don't do the monthly KU fee. I gift myself a subscription so I don't have to pay every month. That's a better option for those who find the raise in the fee a negative. But most KU readers, NEED KU. It's the only way we read books and it's unrealistic for us to expect a program to be around almost a decade and stay the same price.

[PaulineMRoss]

Yes, for me as a reader who uses KU a LOT, it's no big deal. It's still really good value, and it's the first increase since KU began.

As an author, it's had a big impact. I think there were a lot of people who said: hang on, I hardly ever use KU, I'm not paying that. They've cancelled their subscriptions, there's less money going into the KU pot and the KU page rate has dropped dramatically. It will settle again, but for the moment, it's a lot lower than it's been - in fact, lower than it's ever been. So I'm a bit sad about it, really.

[TimothyEllis]

They've cancelled their subscriptions, there's less money going into the KU pot

Subscriptions never went into the KU pot.

It's always been arbitrary figure based on what Amazon wanted to pay out that month.

What is the rate at the moment?

[LilyBLily]

I do have to consider whether I read enough books per month to justify the cost this coming month. In July I read 18 books and 15 of them were in KU, so their average cost was 80 cents. Not a bad deal at all.

KU is like continuous house cleaning the easy way. Back in the day, voracious romance readers had to buy books because most libraries could not sufficiently feed our habit. (They still can't.) We ended up with cartons of them stuffed in garages, basements, or attics--books we knew we would never reread. I've parted with hundreds of paperbacks over a lifetime of reading and very few of them have I wanted to recover. I still have hundreds more. Sooner or later they will have to go.

Contrast that with KU. We can't keep more than a certain number of borrowed titles at once, so most go back to Amazon without any heartache. The few we might consider rereading we can either buy later when (or if) they are on discount, or we can buy immediately. They only take up space on the Kindle, too. We're not cluttering up our homes.

Sometimes we are helping an author twice over. As far as I know, if I read a book in KU and later buy it, the author gets both the KU page read money and the straight royalty.

[Bill Hiatt]

Personally, I've made arrangements to be buried with my books. Yes, I'm joking.

I'm not a KU subscriber, but these days, I buy books in ebook format unless it's something I really want or need that isn't available that way. Space is finite.

With regard to the relationship (or lack thereof) between KU subscriptions and KU payouts, though they aren't formally linked, I can't help but think there's some relationship. I guess we'll never know with certainty.

[R. C.]

...Space is finite...

Gonna have to disagree.  For proof, I offer:

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

and

"In an infinite Universe anything can happen." - Douglas Adams

 

R.C.

[TimothyEllis]

...Space is finite...

Gonna have to disagree.  For proof, I offer:

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

and

"In an infinite Universe anything can happen." - Douglas Adams

 

R.C.

"...where anything can happen, but probably won't." - Graham Garden, The Goodies.

[Post-Crisis D]

Well, there is the theory that we're actually living in a holographic universe where we exist on a 2D plane but experience the universe as 3D because of the holographic effect.  So, if we break the 2D plane in the third dimension to reach a second 2D plane, we'll have effectively doubled the size of the universe.  Keep digging and space is near infinite depending upon the size of the 3D object of which our 2D plane of existence is a slice.

[TimothyEllis]

Is anyone calculating the current KU rate these days?

It would be nice if that thread was kept up to date every month, if someone could do that.

The claim here was the rate was really bad. I'd like to know what it is.

[LilyBLily]

Dave at Kindlepreneur did: $0.0039889 per "page"

[PaulineMRoss]

Dave at Kindlepreneur did: $0.0039889 per "page"

Which is the lowest ever. Previous lowest $0.004034 in July 2017.

[Jeff Tanyard]

Well, there is the theory that we're actually living in a holographic universe where we exist on a 2D plane but experience the universe as 3D because of the holographic effect.  So, if we break the 2D plane in the third dimension to reach a second 2D plane, we'll have effectively doubled the size of the universe.  Keep digging and space is near infinite depending upon the size of the 3D object of which our 2D plane of existence is a slice.

I read a similar story once.   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland