I just canceled my Kindle Unlimited $9.99 monthly subscription. Are you a Kindle Unlimited subscriber? Why or why not?

It would be impossible to overstate how excited I was when Amazon announced the Kindle Unlimited program this past summer. 10 bucks a month to browse e-books seemed like a great deal. The fact that Amazon promised to include audiobooks, and audiobooks that synced up with the Kindle books, made Kindle Unlimited even more appealing.

The reality of Kindle Unlimited ended up being wildly divergent from all the hype.

While Amazon promises 700,000 e-books (and thousands of audiobooks), almost none of these books were ones I actually want to read. The selection on Kindle Unlimited is shockingly bad. Amazon seems to have been completely unable to persuade authors or publishers to join the program.

The other problem with Kindle Unlimited is that it is difficult to discover books that qualify. There is no easy way to see which books in your Amazon or Audible Wish Lists are Unlimited eligible. Amazon does nothing to match the books that I’ve previously purchased or have put in my Wish list with books available through Kindle Unlimited. There is no Kindle Unlimited recommendation engine.

The mistake that Amazon seems to be making is that they structure the Kindle Unlimited program at the low-end of the book buying market. It seems that they wanted to keep the monthly price below $10, and have therefore decided to compensate publishers and authors at a low rate. Each Kindle Unlimited borrow pays an author about $1.40

What would of the payment had to have been to attract almost every author and publisher?

The opportunity to sample every Kindle and Audible book would be enormously appealing. I would happily pay $1 a day for unlimited access to digital books.

My guess is that there are lots of other big readers out there who would also be willing to pay a buck a day for this service.

Why didn’t Amazon go after the hard core reading public with a high quality and higher priced service?

Are you a Kindle Unlimited subscriber?

How much would you pay for an all-you-can eat digital book subscription service?

To illustrate just how bad the selection in Kindle Unlimited is, I’ve copied the first screen of my Kindle Wish List. As far as I can tell, none of these books is in the Kindle Unlimited program. (I'm also curious if we share any books on our Wish Lists).