Prime remains mostly about ‘free’ shipping. If you don’t have it, and buy lots of physical goods from Amazon, then you can save money on that, though you may in the end pay more than you would if you bought the same stuff elsewhere and less conveniently.
#2 value is Prime Video. It’s not Netflix, but it is ‘free’ for subscribers. Some of the content is outstanding. But there is a lot of good free content elsewhere (I can’t stand YouTube myself, mostly because Google so blatantly mines your personal data to sell to advertisers and who knows what else, and it does no good to pay for ad-free, they still mine the data). Amazon does this also of course but I think they are a little more respectful.
#3 is some free music streaming. But I could never be satisfied with the selection. I am more than willing to pay for a service that offers everything, because I like nearly everything. And I pay for classical music channel too for live performances and archive of that. But it is probably okay for people that enjoy the ‘familiar’, maybe even most people who aren’t culture snobs like me.
Distant #4 is being able borrow from a rotating stock of a couple of thousand ebooks and audiobooks and magazine issues, and 1 or 2 free ebooks per month which I take them up on but rarely read. It’s really an afterthought.
KU basically nullifies #4 (except for the free books) as you cannot combine the borrowing limits of each. You can get it for as little as $6/mo. There are more than 70,000 titles, it includes pretty much everything that is in Prime Lending plus a lot more. Almost all of it is content exclusive to Amazon (in ebook format anyway), because those are the terms of entry, but included is a small selection of major publisher content that rotates in and out via some other terms Amazon works out.
Quality is a mixed bag but there is great stuff too, and you aren’t paying much to explore it, and there is no wait list or return-by date pressure. If all I wanted to read were genre fiction, maybe it is not Stephen King or Nora Roberts but you would have an essentially endless supply of ‘comfort’ reading as well as more unusual stuff and total junk. There is non fiction as well, for example piano and guitar sheet music and learning.
I’ve subscribed when it launched, but have never paid $10/month for it. There are regular promotional rates that make it $6-7/month, and offers bundled with new Kindle purchase (3-6 mo for free). I find it difficult to avoid purchasing books that interest me if they are selling for $2-3, and I would wind up buying KU titles without a subscription. So in that sense I get my money’s worth and support independent authors even if some other KU subscribers are actually doing most of the reading. I still read mostly books I’ve bought or borrowed from public library, because KU does not include many books I have a specific interest in, and somehow that reading becomes more ‘urgent’ (only 21 days to read this, or I paid $10 for this), even if it is not objectively ‘better’. It complements that reading though. If you have friends and family who enjoy reading on Kindle, you can lend out Kindles registered to your account and that can also be part of the value (my family has such Kindles but I think they are gathering dust).
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