[haertig]

Amazon Prime has many features - free shipping, free videos, free music, free books, etc. The best is the free shipping and the free videos. There is a very limited selection of free music. And a ridiculously pitiful selection of free books (free to borrow, not free to own). Do not subscribe to Amazon Prime if what you want is books, you will be sorely disappointed.

Kindle Unlimited is free books only. Well, not "free". You pay a monthly fee and for that fee you get to check out (borrow) up to ten books at a time, as many books as you want. There is a very large selection of books. But don't go thinking you will be finding books from big name authors. K.U. does not carry books by authors you would have heard of, other than a token one or two books. Maybe from Harry Potter or something. So don't let their ads - that always highlight the one or two big name books they carry - influence you. Your selection will be from mostly unknown authors. That being said, there are still a lot of good books to be had from K.U. And a lot of bad ones too. But you really do have a ton to choose from, so it may work out good for you. First, you have to be a fast reader who reads constantly. Otherwise, it will be cheaper to buy the books outright rather than to "rent" them from K.U. Most K.U. books sell for $2.99 or less, many are $0.99. So you can see that for the normal $9.99 per month you pay for K.U., you could buy three of those books. Do you read more than three books per month? If not, you may want to reconsider if K.U. will be valuable for you.

K.U. has many free or reduced price trials throughout the year. I am on my fourth trial currently. I have had two free three month trials, and two trials for $0.99 each - one of those $0.99 trials was for three months, the other was for four months (they sent me an email near the end of the trial saying they were giving me an extra month free). So I have had a total of 13 months total of K.U. for $1.98 just by waiting around for the trials to pop up. And one always pops up every few months. You will find that the free trials are not always available to you if you have previously used a free trial. Some are, some aren't - read the small print in the offer. But so far, the $0.99 trials are available to anyone - no matter how many previous trials you have used.

I do not read fast enough for a normal price K.U. subscription to benefit me. I would lose money compared to just buying the books outright. However, I do grab the free and $0.99 trials every time they come up.