Back last July, when Amazon announced its Kindle Unlimited (KU) program, I scratched my head and said, “Well.” When I scratch my head and say, “Well,” it generally means that I’m confronting something that appears to be a good idea but will definitely generate unintended consequences. So it was with the ACA, and so it is with KU.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, KU lacks the power to bring down an entire industry…or does it? Stay with me; I’ll offer up what insights I can.<\/p>\n
KU is a subscription service for ebooks. Pay Amazon $10 a month, and it’s all-you-can-slurp from a 700,000-book collection that includes both Harry Potter<\/em> and Lord of the Rings<\/em>. Sounds great! Except…once you get past Harry and Frodo, the slurpins get mighty thin mighty fast. From what I’ve read, not a single one of the Big Five has placed any books with KU. KU is populated by small press, very small press, and (overwhelmingly) self-publishers. The material published on KU leans way<\/em> toward genre fiction, especially romance, erotica, and mysteries. (Good numbers on KU categories have proven hard to come by. If you have them, please share.)<\/p>\n I compare KU to Netflix, where much of what you find is what nobody wants to pay for as individual titles. It’s not about “Where’s the show I want?” so much as “What’s out there to fill an hour or two of dead time?” In that respect, KU could be considered the mass-market paperback shelf of the ebook world. MM paperbacks were created to be read once<\/em>, just like the pulp magazines that preceded them<\/a>. They were a way to kill time. I’m not sure anybody expected that they would remain on reader shelves for decades, as some of mine have. (Most have been given away or tossed in the recycle bin. And I admit that my favorites have been falling apart for decades<\/a>.) There were power readers back then who would read a book basically every day, picking a library fiction section clean in a couple of months or less, and spending an extraordinary amount of money on new titles at the bookstore. I think we have more power readers now than ever before. KU goes to great lengths to connect power readers with (mostly) new titles. So it’s a Really Good Thing for authors, right?<\/p>\n “Well,” he said, scratching his head.<\/p>\n Next entry: How it works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back last July, when Amazon announced its Kindle Unlimited (KU) program, I scratched my head and said, “Well.” When I scratch my head and say, “Well,” it generally means that I’m confronting something that appears to be a good idea but will definitely generate unintended consequences. So it was with the ACA, and so it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[33,17,16],"class_list":["post-3304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideasandanalysis","tag-books","tag-ebooks","tag-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3305,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304\/revisions\/3305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}