Can you get Kindle Unlimited for free with Amazon Prime?

The point of an Amazon Prime membership is, of course, to get you doing more of your shopping through Amazon. To deter you from ever jumping ship though, the company likes to include a variety of perks beyond free and fast shipping, such as Prime Video and Music Prime. You might be willing to put up with rising Prime fees if the alternative is losing access to a library of favorite streaming titles.

A natural question for readers is whether Kindle Unlimited is included with Prime. If your appetite for books is large enough to warrant a subscription, here’s what you need to know.

Is Kindle Unlimited included for free with Amazon Prime?

Brace yourselves, the upsell is coming

No it’s not, unfortunately. Instead, what you get is Prime Reading, a collection of “over a thousand” books, comics, and magazines spanning multiple genres. That’s a thin slice of the millions included with Kindle Unlimited, never mind the literary world as a whole. You do get some titles in Audible form so you can switch between reading and listening to audiobooks, but expect few if any recent bestsellers to make an appearance.

If you want Kindle Unlimited, you’ll need to pay $11.99 per month once your 30-day trial is up. The good news is that Amazon lets you “borrow” up to 20 items at a time, and Unlimited’s selection includes plenty of titles you’ll recognize, like the Harry Potter series. As with Prime Reading, some of these have audio versions, though you’ll still have to sift through Amazon’s selection. As of this writing there are only 6,000 Unlimited-tagged audiobooks.

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Which devices support Kindle Unlimited?

All of them, basically

The service works with Amazon’s dedicated Kindle e-readers, as well as any device capable of running the mobile Kindle app. That includes iPhones, iPads, and most Android-based phones and tablets, such as Amazon’s Fire lineup. There are even Mac and Windows apps, though that’s a little redundant given the ability to read via the web.

Be aware that not every device can handle every feature of the service. Some older Kindles may not be equipped for audio, for instance, and of course a graphic novel like Watchmen is going to look a little dull on a black-and-white e-paper display. You may want to think twice before automatically buying a Kindle tablet for all of your reading.

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Why doesn’t Amazon bundle Kindle Unlimited with Prime?

It has to do with royalties

Pocket-lint / Amazon

You might be tempted to blame naked greed, but the most likely explanation is publishing rights. Amazon pays out royalties for each book read on the service, and the cost would probably eat deep into Prime profits if it didn’t charge a separate fee. Audiobooks tend to be even more expensive than text, since there are performers and producers involved.

Amazon does presumably want to generate a profit from Unlimited — it’s just less of an incentive than you might think. First there’s the matter of keeping the lights on in the Kindle offices.