Amazon has announced that it will have a book borrowing program called Kindle Unlimited. Quick explanation: For ten bucks you can borrow unlimited ebooks, but only those in the Kindle Select program (the ones you could borrow once a month if you had a Prime account). This borrowing program also allows for audiobooks for those that have that option. Got it? Okay, great!
Now….I have many authors as friends on Facebook (probably too many). The response to this has been disheartening. I have heard a few people just outright saying it was a terrible idea while shaking their fist at the clouds. Others just saying they thought it probably wouldn’t work and they (the authors) were getting ripped off of sales. Another camp of folks seemed to tremulously say “we’ll have to see how it goes”.
Hasn’t Amazon earned just a bit of faith at this point, people? Truly though, faith in Amazon isn’t the main point here…where is the optimism?
My view on this whole thing is “Hell Yeah!” I hope it’s awesome for readers and authors and I choose to go into this assuming that it will be. Maybe I’ll be wrong. I won’t care, I’ll just move on to the next thing. I would much rather head into something with a positive outlook and hope for success than dip a toe in, worried about failure.
I’m sure Abraham Lincoln has a quote about worrying about ebook failure inhibiting success or something along those lines. Maybe it was Ghandi. As far as I can tell, all quotes get assigned to those two gentlemen. I’ll find one and get back to you.
The point is that we’ve never had an unlimited borrowing service from Amazon, much the same way as we’ve never really had a post-apocalyptic survival situation. Why must people just assume it will be terrible? C’mon, look on the bright side. Drink from the half-full glass. You may be shocked how it changes your entire outlook.
Now go sign up for Kindle Unlimited. I think it’s going to be awesome!!
TravisMohrman 
I’m an amazon prime member. I thought being able to borrow a book once a month would be great for me. However, since I have so many author friends on Facebook & since I was momentarily infected with some sort of “be-unselfish-and-think-of-others” thing, I didn’t want to borrow books if my friends weren’t going to get paid. Seems to me that would pretty much suck. So I checked into it & discovered that authors actually tend to get a little more money from borrowed books than from sold books. Weird, but true (at least as of last summer). If that’s the case here, then seems like this would be awesome, especially if we can borrow more than one book per month. Even if it’s not true,
(1) I don’t think an author has to make their books available to be borrowed (not everyone’s books are available to be borrowed now, anyway) and
(2) if a book gets downloaded for free, the reader will tell others about it, even if they don’t read it for months…it will eventually get read. And, no one borrows a book to read sometime in the future. They read it now, so word of mouth would start almost immediately.
Just a thought.
“Abraham Lincoln never had to deal with this ebook shit!” — Ghandi (shaking fist at clouds)
All excellent points. The borrows currently give you a share of a big pot of money, it usually equals around 2 dollars a borrow. So it depends how much your book is priced, but still, the authors get some money and the readers get a book for free. If they really like the book, they will probably purchase a copy to re-read at a later date (i do this all the time). It’s a good deal for everybody.
Fuck it. I’m in.
That’s the attitude i’m looking for!!