Kindle Unlimited: the Spotify or Netflix of books

Well, it was rumoured earlier in the week, and now it’s official: Amazon has announced Kindle Unlimited in the US. What do you get? Unlimited access to a library of books for $9.99 a month.

Amazon.com today introduced Kindle Unlimited—a new subscription service which allows customers to freely read as much as they want from over 600,000 Kindle books, and listen as much as they want to thousands of Audible audiobooks, all for only $9.99 a month. Finding a great book is easy, and there are never any due dates—just look for the Kindle Unlimited logo on eligible titles and click “Read for Free.”

There’s 600,000 books available in the service right now, and I’d expect that to grow. No word on a UK launch date just yet, but there is a rather breathily-voiced video, if you want to watch it…

I wonder how prevalent the renting media model is going to become? Streaming music and film services are certainly eating into traditional sales already.