I still have a KU subscription, but am not planning on renewing it when it comes up. And this blog post helped me understand why mostly the books I want to read aren't in KU.
I find I have mostly ended up using KU to get the most recent book in a series (if it's actually in KU) to read right away, thus soothing my impatience, and then I wait until it drops in price somewhat before buying. But pretty much the only series that I care about enough to want the newest one right away are also the ones I eventually buy, even though at reduced price, so I'm not really getting the full value from KU. If I added up the full prices of the books I've used KU for, it probably wouldn't add up to the price of KU, although I shudder at the thought of buying full price. Still, if I can make myself wait, or maybe get some titles via the library until they go on sale, I'll save a lot by not re-upping KU.
The only other benefit to KU for me is the ability to read Amazon-published titles for free, but almost all of those go on sale for either $1.99, or even sometimes $0.99, from time to time, so again, I'd have to buy a lot of them to even approach the cost of KU. And I'll still have the Prime Reading titles available, since as a family we make enough use of Amazon Prime to keep it for now, although if it goes up too much more in price, we may have to re-think that too
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Originally Posted by DNSB
An interesting comment. One author my wife loves pulled her books from KU for somewat similar economic reasons. The payment per book did not make up for the income loss from sales at other bookstores. It wasn't a great difference but she estimated her income dropped by ~8% when her books were on KU and not available on other bookstores. She mentioned dropping a book to anything from $1.99 to free on sites such as Bookbub for a short time worked better for boosting sales of other books in a series. Evidently KU readers would wait for the next book in a series to become available on KU and not actually spend the money to purchase it.
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