10:11 – I briefly considered joining Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program yesterday, but I decided it’s not worth the hassle. Like the Kindle Lending Library that allows any Prime member to “borrow” one book per month without additional charge, Amazon has intentionally made Kindle Unlimited as difficult as possible to use. They obviously want to discourage anyone from borrowing books under either program. Otherwise, whenever you search Amazon’s books there’d be checkboxes to refine the search by selecting “Show only Kindle Unlimited titles” and “Show only Kindle Lending Library titles”. But it doesn’t work that way. You have to choose a specific book and then figure out if it’s available under one or the other program, both, or neither. Amazon makes both programs such a hassle to use that I’m not going to bother using KLL and I sure won’t pay them $10/month for KU.
Or perhaps I’ll sign up for their free 30-day Kindle Unlimited trial to explore further. I’m not optimistic. The main issue is that KU doesn’t include titles from the Big Five (formerly the Big Six) publishers, and many of the books Barbara wants are from those publishers. The other issue is that Amazon keeps track by communicating with your Kindle(s) behind the scenes. The authors get paid if you get a book under either program and read at least the first 10% of the book. That means that Amazon is watching what we do, and I don’t like that. In fact, I’m going to disable WiFi access on both Barbara’s and my mono Kindles, leaving only her Fire able to access Amazon and vice versa. Not that disabling WiFi access on our mono Kindles loses us anything. Every time I try to connect with one of them, the Kindle crashes and I have to do a hard reset, losing everything that was on the Kindle.