Amazon Prime members finally get some real book benefits
For just under $100 a year, Amazon Prime is a pretty good deal: free 2-day shipping, all the streaming music and video content you can consume and cloud storage for all of your photos. What's been missing, oddly, is any kind of significant book deal — until now.
On Wednesday, the online retail giant added Amazon Prime Reading to the list of benefits offered with Prime. Yes, books, the thing that helped build the Amazon business, is the last benefit to be added to Prime.
Now, included in your monthly payment of $10.99 (or discounted $99 a year payment), members get free access to the digital version of roughly 1,000 books and popular magazines. Physical copies will still cost you. A brief perusal of the offerings turns up, naturally, no current best-sellers.
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Members can read selections from Prime Reading on their Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets and any device that supports the Kindle App.
Prime Reading, which has a fairly limited set of popular books like The Butterfly Garden, The Man in High Castle and even the first Harry Potter book, stands in contrast to Amazon's other book-reading deal, Kindle Unlimited. That $9.99 all-you-can-eat service opens up much more of Amazon's entire library of ebooks (estimates have it at around a quarter of a million titles). Unlimited also adds free Audible editions of Amazon's books.
There is some overlap between Kindle Unlimited and the new Amazon Prime Reading service. We noticed a number of digital magazine titles, like People and GQ, across both services.
Prime Reading also adds free access to Amazon's growing collection of short stories, Kindle Singles.
Topics Amazon
Lance Ulanoff was Chief Correspondent and Editor-at-Large of Mashable. Lance acted as a senior member of the editing team, with a focus on defining internal and curated opinion content. He also helped develop staff-wide alternative story-telling skills and implementation of social media tools during live events. Prior to joining Mashable in September 2011 Lance Ulanoff served as Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for the Ziff Davis, Inc. While there, he guided the brand to a 100% digital existence and oversaw content strategy for all of Ziff Davis’ Web sites. His long-running column on PCMag.com earned him a Bronze award from the ASBPE. Winmag.com, HomePC.com and PCMag.com were all been honored under Lance’s guidance.He makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Fox News, the Today Show, Good Morning America, Kelly and Michael, CNBC, CNN and the BBC.He has also offered commentary on National Public Radio and been interviewed by newspapers and radio stations around the country. Lance has been an invited guest speaker at numerous technology conferences including SXSW, Think Mobile, CEA Line Shows, Digital Life, RoboBusiness, RoboNexus, Business Foresight and Digital Media Wire’s Games and Mobile Forum.
