All posts by Steve Windwalker

Listen up! Don’t miss these deeply discounted audiobook bestsellers for November 6, 2023!

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No subscription needed!<br><br>Click the Buy Button below to save $20 for a limited time on this bestselling Sandra Brown audiobook!<br><br>Friction

No subscription needed!

Click the Buy Button below to save $20 for a limited time on this bestselling Sandra Brown audiobook!

Friction

by Sandra Brown
read by Stephen Lang
(11 hours 40 minutes)
Rated: 4.5 over 572 reviews
After a courtroom gunman threatens everything he holds dear, a Texas Ranger with a checkered past must choose between vengeance and family in this #1 New York Times bestselling thriller.

Friction will keep you on the edge of your seat with breathtaking plot twists and the unforgettable characters that make Sandra Brown one of the world’s best-loved authors. It is an extraordinary novel about the powerful ties that bind us to the ones we love and the secrets we keep to protect them.

Today’s Bargain Price: $4.99

Buy Now!

Supports BookGorilla with Commissions Earned

Deal expires 11/17/2023, then it’s back to $24.98

Categories: Mysteries & Thrillers, Romance
Click the Buy Button below to save $12 for a limited time on this bestselling Catherine Coulter audiobook!<br><br>The Devil's Triangle

Click the Buy Button below to save $12 for a limited time on this bestselling Catherine Coulter audiobook!

The Devil’s Triangle

by Catherine Coulter & J.T. Ellison
read by MacLeod Andrews
(12 hours 23 minutes)
Rated: 4.6 over 52 reviews
From New York Times bestselling authors Catherine Coulter and J.T. Ellison comes the highly anticipated thriller in their Brit in the FBI series, featuring special agents Nicholas Drummond and Michaela Caine in their new roles as heads of the Covert Eyes team-but will their first case be their last when the enigmatic and dangerous thief known as the Fox reappears?

“He who controls the weather, will control the world. He who controls time, will never be around.” -Thomas Frey

Today’s Bargain Price: $2.99

Buy Now!

Supports BookGorilla with Commissions Earned

Deal expires 11/24/2023, then it’s back to $14.99

Categories: Mysteries & Thrillers
Click the Buy Button below to save $17 for a limited time on this bestselling Tony Hillerman audiobook!<br><br>The Fallen Man

Click the Buy Button below to save $17 for a limited time on this bestselling Tony Hillerman audiobook!

The Fallen Man

by Tony Hillerman

No subscription needed!

read by Christian Baskous
(8 hours 9 minutes)
Rated: 4.5 over 404 reviews
An “irresistible” mystery (Kirkus Reviews) from a New York Times bestselling author: When a Navajo canyon guide is almost murdered by a sniper, police officer Joe Leaphorn emerges from retirement to investigate. And as he digs further into the case, Joe begins to see connections to a missing person case that’s over a decade old…

Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels!  

Today’s Bargain Price: $4.99

Buy Now!

Supports BookGorilla with Commissions Earned

Deal expires 12/01/2023, then it’s back to $21.99

Categories: Fiction, Mysteries & Thrillers
Click the Buy Button below to save $12 for a limited time on this bestselling Agatha Christie audiobook!<br><br>The Secret of Chimneys

Click the Buy Button below to save $12 for a limited time on this bestselling Agatha Christie audiobook!

The Secret of Chimneys

by Agatha Christie
read by Charles Armstrong
(6 hours 51 minutes)
Rated: 4.3 over 607 reviews
Marking the first appearance of Agatha Christie’s character Inspector Battle, The Secret of Chimneys was first published in 1925 and went on to be a hit among readers.

This mystery novel follows Anthony Cade, a man who unknowingly finds himself in the middle of an international conspiracy and a murder investigation after accepting a simple delivery job from an old friend. As Cade slowly begins to realize his predicament has potentially put him in danger, he begins his own investigation into the strange series of events just as Inspector Battle of Scotland Yard begins the main, official investigation. As more and more clues begin to pop up—along with even more mysteries—Inspector Battle and Anthony Cade search diligently for the true murderer and uncover the answers to multiple conundrums that plague the characters within the novel.

Today’s Bargain Price: $2.99

Buy Now!

Supports BookGorilla with Commissions Earned

Deal expires 12/30/2023, then it’s back to $14.99

Categories: Fiction, Mysteries & Thrillers
Click the Buy Button below to save $10 for a limited time on this brand new bestselling memoir from Britney Spears audiobook!<br><br>The Woman in Me

Click the Buy Button below to save $10 for a limited time on this brand new bestselling Britney Spears audiobook!

The Woman in Me

by Britney Spears

Our guarantee: No subscription needed!

read by Michelle Williams
(5 hours 32 minutes)
Rated: 4.7 over 104 reviews
“In Britney Spears’s memoir, she’s stronger than ever.” —The New York Times

The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history. Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.

Today’s Bargain Price: $14.99

Buy Now!

Supports BookGorilla with Commissions Earned

Deal expires 11/30/2023, then it’s back to 24.99

Categories: Nonfiction

 

Here’s the Scoop: How to Maximize Your Chances of Winning a Kindle Fire from BookGorilla and KND

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61EZr4mYcYL._SL1000_Have you heard?

BookGorilla is giving away a Kindle Fire tablet each and every day this year. We want to do everything we can to maximize chances for our regular subscribers and readers to win these very cool Amazon devices, so here are a few tips, followed by a link to today’s giveaway sweepstakes:

  1. Each day’s Kindle Fire giveaway will have a distinct entry link or URL, and you won’t be able to enter unless you have that link. Occasionally we will put these links on Twitter or Facebook, and occasionally we will allow sharing of these links with friends and other online acquaintances, but the only place where you will be able to find the entry link every single day will be in our daily BookGorilla alerts via email or the BookGorilla alert app.
  2. Therefore, the first thing to do to make absolutely sure you are able to enter every day is to make sure you are signed up for a FREE BookGorilla subscription, via the BookGorilla email alert or the BookGorilla app alert. We never provide the entry link to anyone until 9:30 a.m. Eastern time for each day’s giveaway, when the BookGorilla alert goes out. You should see the alert in your inbox or app notifications soon thereafter, so that you can enter right away. (Please note that when we say 9:30 am we mean 9:30 Eastern, 6:30 Pacific, etc.)
  3. Once you have the entry link for a given day, it just takes a few seconds to enter that day’s sweepstakes, and the only other requirement for entry is that you follow BookGorilla on Twitter, which is incredibly quick, easy, and free.

That’s it. We wish you good luck, and, oh yes … here’s the link to today’s Sweepstakes (January 29, 2016, and it may well last into the weekend):

http://bit.ly/Fire-Giveaway-BG-1-29-16-r

Oh, finally, we should tell you this. About 85% of the time, the daily sweepstakes will be based on a random number, chosen by AmazonGiveaways, so that the winner could be anyone from the very first entry on a given day to the 4999th entry, or anywhere in between, depending on the number of entries we establish as the maximum. The other 15% of the time, like today, we will establish a lucky number and the prize will be awarded to the entry that matches that lucky number, such as the 1999th entry or, today, the 7777th entry.

Good luck!

 

 

Listen to this!

Brand new, by popular demand:  For now, let’s call it AudibleGorilla

Audible

Last week we surveyed our readers and asked: “Are there media other than ebooks for which you would enjoy receiving a BookGorilla-style service to recommend special deals on curated titles in your preference areas?”

The three most popular categories were audiobooks, apps for tablets, and print books. 

And just to show you that we always listen closely to you, this week we are expanding our coverage in the audiobook category. For now, we’ll share one or two featured audiobook deals each day from Amazon’s own Audible.com store, and starting today you’ll see a cute little Audible icon like this whenever there’s an Audible version of a book we’re recommending:

Available on Audible

If you’ve never tried Audible, now’s the time to get two FREE full-length audiobooks when you sign up for a FREE 30-day trial:

Try Audible and Get Two Free Audiobooks

One of the Best Readers’ LifeHacks Ever?


If eBook Bestseller Prices Are So High, Why Did BookGorilla Readers Get 91 of the Year’s Top 100 Bestsellers at an Average Price of $2.92?

comparison, Features, Kindle Prices, News

by Steve Windwalker – October 13, 2015

Source: BookGorilla’s Annual Analysis of Top 100 Kindle Bestseller Prices

Okay, it’s multiple choice time. Two statements. Please pick one that’s true:

  1. Traditional publishers’ bestseller prices are rising to ridiculous levels, with an average original price of $11.22 for the Top 100 bestsellers in the Kindle store for the calendar year 2014.
  2. Traditional publishers are offering over 90% of their top Kindle bestsellers at huge, BookGorilla-worthy discounts, so that, to date, 91 of those Top 100 bestsellers for 2014 have been featured on BookGorilla, at an average price of $2.92.

The answer? Both statements are true.

More that any time since the 2007 launch of the Kindle, the big publishers are taking advantage of discounting incentives offered by Amazon to ensure that nearly every bestseller, and most other books as well, are offered at some point at the kind of low sub-$4 prices that ebook readers have come to love.

The vast majority of the time, let’s be clear, the prices for those same books are much higher.

Equally clear, there is a large swath of readers who are the readers’ equivalent of early adopters. They are eager, one could even say impatient, to buy bestsellers and their favorite authors’ other books when they first come out. They pay mightily to be part of this “be the first on your block” club; if they had purchased all of the Top 100 Kindle bestsellers of 2014 at their original prices, they would have spent $1,121.55. But pay they do, obviously. Otherwise  — and here’s this week’s tautology — those Top 100 Kindle bestsellers would not have been on the list.

But by putting nearly all of their most popular books on deep discounts averaging about 73% for short periods of time, usually ranging from one day to a month, the traditional publishers have made bargain-hunting an extremely beneficial exercise for a different group of readers: those who balance their love for bestsellers and other quality selections with very conscious price sensitivity.

By waiting for the right moment and pouncing when these books are at their best prices ever, an especially voracious price-sensitive reader could have purchased  the 91 bestsellers featured by BookGorilla for just $265.60. That’s a savings of $731.04 over the $996.44 original cost of these 91 titles. (Some of the other nine books were never offered at a serious discount; some others didn’t make it through BookGorilla’s curating process, in spite of their bestseller status.)

But there’s a catch, of course. Anyone could find those savings on the day they pop up, but you’d have to be looking … and looking … and looking. It would take so much time that there would be little or no time for reading. BookGorilla’s purpose is to find and recognize the best bargains and serve them up to our hundreds of thousands of followers each morning based on subscribers’ selected preferences.

No other ebook bargain alert service has delivered even half of these Top 100 bestseller deals to its subscribers over the past two years, which is why we humbly submit that, along with the Kindle itself, BookGorilla is the one of the greatest lifehacks ever for avid readers. (We also include recommendations for curated 5-star discoveries by indie authors and small or new-media presses, but in stark contrast to other ebook bargain alert services, fewer than 15% of the titles we recommend are ad-supported.)

Who are these price-sensitive readers? Well, we’re not going to give up their names or email addresses, but we’re happy to share some results from our latest BookGorilla 3-Minute Survey on “What Makes an Attractive eBook Bargain?”

We asked the 2,180 readers who have responded during the past week to select the statement that best approximates their approach to this question:

“How important are bargain prices in your decisions about which ebooks to buy?”

Here’s how they responded:

  1. I often pay full retail prices of $9.99 or above, but I also like to find bargain prices on books that I know I want to read.  136 responses – 6.24%
  2. Finding bargain prices is essential to my effort to stay on a budget, and I rarely pay full retail prices of $9.99 or above.  654 responses – 30.03%
  3. I almost never pay more than $2.99 for an ebook purchase.  740 responses – 33.98%
  4. I rarely download any ebook that is not free.  477 responses – 21.90%
  5. None of the above.  171 responses – 7.85%

These survey respondents don’t constitute all readers, of course. But they’re our readers, and it’s our mission to make them happy.  We wouldn’t want it any other way!

Coming in our next column: Okay, so price-sensitive readers get great deals, and everybody else seems willing to pay through the roof? Is it really such a win-win situation? We’ll take a closer look at why those $12 to $15 “regular” prices are unsustainable for even the largest publishers.

 

Kindle Store eBook Prices Are Rising … Or Are They?

Kindle Prices, News

by Steve Windwalker

October 5, 2015

There has been a steady drumbeat of complaints lately that Kindle Store prices are going up, up and away now that several major publishers have written “agency model pricing” into their latest ebook contracts with Amazon.

Is it really the case? Well, yes and no.

First, let’s take a look at a positively eerie case of the ebook price planets being in alignment. The chart below shows a price breakdown of the Top 100 bestsellers in the Kindle store. You can see that 27% of the Top 100 were priced under $3;  55% were priced between $3 and $9.99; and 18% were priced at $10 and up:

Screen Shot 2015-10-05 at 4.25.46 PM

Swell, you say, but when was this? And it’s the answer to that question that’s kind of amazing, because the above chart is an exact reflection of the price breakdown on Kindle bestsellers for three very different date ranges:

  • a snapshot of the Top 100 bestsellers on January 18, 2013;
  • a snapshot of the Top 100 bestsellers this past weekend, on October 4, 2015; and
  • Amazon’s calendar year list of the Top 100 bestsellers cumulatively from January 1, 2015 through October 4, 2015.

How can this possibly be? Well, we all know that figures lie and liars figure, so let’s put aside the YTD figures for now and take a closer look at the two single-day snapshots, using this comparative analysis from BookGorilla. Inside those aggregate figures, there are some fascinating trends:

  • There have been significant increases at both extremes of the pricing spectrum. On the low end, the number of 99-cent bestsellers increased from 15% to 24%. At the high end, the number of bestsellers priced at $13 and up has increased from 5% to 14%.
  • The clearest indication that the big publishers are raising their prices precipitously comes when one compares that increase at $13 and up with a dramatic change over the same period in the number of bestsellers priced from $9.99 to $12.99. 22% of the Top 100 bestsellers were in that price range back in January 2013, but only 6% fell in that range this weekend. Most eye-popping is the fact that, as of October 4, 2015, none of the books in the Top 100 bestsellers were priced at $9.99, which not so long ago was Amazon’s preferred price for bestsellers and new releases on Kindle.

One might conclude, therefore, that with the latest round of big publisher contracts, the publishers have soundly defeated Amazon.

But one would be wrong.

That’s where our most significant statistical comparison comes in:

In our January 2013 analysis, 58% of the Top 50 bestsellers were published by the big traditional publishers, and that figure has since declined to 38%. Conversely, 42% of the Top 50 bestsellers were published by indie authors or by Amazon’s own publishing imprints in January 2013, compared with 62% this past weekend.

In other words, what the big publishers have won in their latest round of contract “victories” over Amazon is the right to price themselves right off the bestseller list.  

And just in case you think that all of the least expensive books are self-published dreck, we’ll get into that in greater detail in the future, but the somewhat tautological truth is that these bestselling non-traditional titles are very popular, well-written books by authors with huge followings, including many who have left traditional publishers to go indie and others who have signed contracts and hit the bestseller lists with Amazon’s ever-expanding group of successful publishing imprints.

We’ll look further into the consequences of these trends for readers, authors, and publishers in future posts, and also look more closely at the meaning of the discrepancy between the snapshot sales rankings and the calendar year bestsellers. But let’s stop there for now and remember that bargains, like beauty, are often in the eye of the beholder.

With that in mind, we would love it if you would take 3 minutes to answer 3 questions about what constitutes a bargain in today’s ebook market, the importance of bargains, and how you find your best ebook buys.

Please? It will really help us drill down on how we can best serve you at BookGorilla. And thanks in advance!

Create your own user feedback survey

Authors, Would You Like Your Own Totally Free BookGorilla Author’s Page with a FOLLOW Button and User-Controlled Sorting for Your Fans?

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(Updated with new features June 4, 2015)

A few weeks ago we shared a reader-facing post about a brand new feature called BookGorilla Author’s Pages, which are meant to make it easier than ever for BookGorilla readers — and all readers — to find your books.

Screen Shot 2015-04-30 at 12.56.57 PMBookGorilla Author Pages are an absolutely free service, and here (at left) is a screenshot example of one that has been live for a couple of weeks, Pulitzer Prize winning NY Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof’s BookGorilla Author’s Page. We hope you like the idea.

We think this will be the ultimate win-win, because our goals are simple: we want to help great authors sell great books, and we want our readers to find the books that they want to read, at the best possible prices. (And of course, the more readers discover great deals on great books, the more BookGorilla will be rewarded, without authors having to pay a dime for this service.)

As with just about anything worth doing, the more we all put into this project, the more good will come of it, but it is clear that It can make a nice difference not only in an author’s book sales but also in the discoverability of his page. Just the other day Nick Kristof sent these updates out to his 1.59 million Twitter followers, his 1.4 million Google Plus followers, and his 600,000+ Facebook followers:

Within a few hours three of the top five front-page Google search listings for his Kindle books (and two of the top six Bing results) were directing searchers to Nick’s BookGorilla Author’s Page.

And now we’ve added a special feature — a “Follow [this author]” button — which gives every visitor to Nick’s page the opportunity to have more of Nick’s Kindle books included in that visitor’s daily BookGorilla alert:

Screen Shot 2015-04-30 at 1.01.26 PM

In addition to the Follow button, we’ve just added an index page (soon to be further enhanced), as well as another user-friendly feature that allows readers to sort the books on any author’s page by price or sales rank:

Screen Shot 2015-06-04 at 2.31.55 PM

Of course you don’t need millions of followers to be effective at driving traffic to your BookGorilla Author’s Page. What you will need, if you don’t have it already, is your own BookGorilla Author’s Page.  We’ve already responded to amazing author interest by creating thousands of new author pages, and we’ll be glad to do the same for you. To get you started, we’ve created a user-friendly web form so you can provide everything we’ll need to create, update, or improve the accuracy of your own BookGorilla Author’s Page:

BookGorilla Author’s Page Input Form

Please be patient, but we’ll do our best to create or update your BookGorilla Author’s Page soon after you submit this form. When your page is live or updated, we will send you a link to your  page so that you can share it with your readers and fans. Whether you use tweets, Facebook updates, a static link on your website, your email signature, or all of these, we hope you’ll use that link to spread the word and encourage your fans to click the “Follow” button on your BookGorilla Author’s Page. When readers click that button, they’ll see your books much more frequently in their daily BookGorilla alerts!

Thanks for taking a moment to read this post — we are very excited about the chance to work with you to help our readers find your books! We hope we’ll see your BookGorilla Author’s Page Input Form soon, and please feel free to share this news with other author and publisher friends!

-Steve Windwalker

The Social Construction of a Bestseller, from The Formula

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The following paragraph from the very smart and well-written book I am reading today is certainly not rocket science, but it is a very nice, concise summary of the way in which the ld516making of a bestseller can be very much a social process, all the more so in the age of the ebook:

“… there is an accidental quality to success, in which high-ranking songs take an early lead for reasons that seem inconsequential, based upon those taste-makers who sample it first. Once this lead is established, it is exacerbated through social feedback. A bookshop, for instance, might notice that one particular book is proving more popular than others, and therefore decide to order more copies. At this stage, the book may be selling 11 copies for every 10 sold by its next most popular rival–a marginal improvement. But when the new copies arrive they are displayed in favorable places around the shop (on a table next to the front door, for example) and soon the book is  selling twice as many copies as its closest rival. To sell even more, the bookshop then decides to try to attract new customers by lowering its own profit margins and selling the book at a reduced price. At this point the book is selling four times as many copies as its closest rival. Because customers have the impression that the book is popular (and therefore must be good) they are more likely to buy it, thereby driving sales up even more.”

from The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems . . . and Create More by Luke Dormehl (Penguin: Perigee Books – November 4, 2014)

–Steve Windwalker

 

 

Here’s something brand new: BookGorilla Author Pages!

Author Pages, Features, News
Screen Shot 2015-03-28 at 5.09.57 PM
A screenshot of novelist Debbie Macomber’s BookGorilla Author Page.

We never tire of working on the kinds of improvements that have made BookGorilla a big favorite with readers who want to find the best-ever deals on books they’ve been wanting to read, and it’s in that spirit that we share the news of a brand new beta feature on our website: BookGorilla Author Pages!

Whether you arrive at one of these author pages from a link in your daily BookGorilla alert, as a result of a blog post like this one, a web search, or a tweet or other mention from an author whom you follow, we think you’ll find that BookGorilla Author Pages provide a great way to drill down on books by your favorite authors.

And since we know that our readers cover the waterfront from bestsellers to indie discoveries across all genres, we’re committed to building a totally inclusive array of BookGorilla Author Pages from favorite indie authors like Suzanne Jenkins to hybrid stars like Noel Hynd to top-tier bestsellers like Harper Lee, Lee Child, and Mary Higgins Clark.

As we grow from a hundred or so prototype pages to thousands and beyond over the coming weeks, we’ll also be introducing additional features like a follow or subscribe button for individual authors, title sorting by price, links to audiobook listings, and more … so please stay tuned!

–Steve Windwalker

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 Million Reasons Why That Other Service Can’t Show You the Deals You Find on BookGorilla

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For many readers who have been keeping up with those daily siBB BG COMP 3-21-2015 PicMonkey Collagede-by-side comparisons that have shown BookGorilla to be far outpacing BookBub when it comes to recommending great book deals on bestselling books by well-known authors, there has been a pretty obvious question:

“Why doesn’t BookBub just work harder to find the kind of books that are featured by BookGorilla each day?”

The answer? It’s complicated, but it’s all about the bottom line. BookBub has nearly 10 million reasons to focus on books that it needs readers to buy, while BookGorilla’s more customer-centric mission is aimed at providing readers with books they already wanted at prices they never dreamed were possible.

We’re sure that BookBub would like to be able to present great deals on more prominent books, but they are constrained by a few obvious structural facts that are implicit in their business model:

  • For starters, BookBub depends on two major revenue streams, which together provide  revenues of over $26,000 daily, or about $9.7 annually, according to our estimates based on information provided on the company’s website. For instance, the 27 books recommended on BookBub’s deals page yesterday would have paid BookBub just over $16,000 for their placement on BookBub’s “curated” list,  and are likely to have brought the company an additional $10,000, at least, in affiliate fees such as Amazon Associates proceeds. “Curated” is as “curated” does, but that $16,000 daily would be a lot of money to leave on the table if BookBub were to make a strategic decision to add value for readers by opting to drop some of those 27 ad-supported spots in favor of more prominent, highly desired books at great deal prices such as those featured on the BookGorilla site.
  • Screen Shot 2015-03-21 at 8.08.12 PM
    Screenshot of third-party banner ad in March 15, 2014 BookBub alert.

    But with that much money coming in, one might ask, wouldn’t BookBub still be profitable if it decided to improve the quality of its daily recommendations by doing just that: replacing some ad-supported spots with more widely known books by bestselling authors? Sure, but then BookBub would run into another difficult structural challenge: the company is increasingly in the position of having to answer to venture capitalists and other angel funders. Indeed, since its May 2014 announcement that it had raised $3.8 million in Series A funding, BookBub has ratcheted up its ad-supported offerings: from 15 to 20 daily spots in early 2014 to 25 to 30 now, with no concomitant increase in bestsellers or other well-known titles. Meanwhile, Bookbub has recently been experimenting with adding paid third-party advertising banners served by LiveIntent (see screenshot above at right ) to the millions of emails it sends out to self-identified book lovers each day. Naturally, the point at which a company accepts investor funding  is usually the point at which its autonomy with respect to its mission begins to come under pressure.

  • While BookBub founder Josh Schanker keeps the lowest of online profiles, it would not be surprising to see him exit with a payday in the high nine figures or beyond, given his history as a serial entrepreneur and BookBub’s impressive success to date. With such heady outcomes looming for Schanker and other key players, one can’t really expect BookBub to allow short-term revenues to soften in favor of a longer-term commitment to adding value for readers by changing the ratio between ad-supported spots and truly curated recommendations of the best books available at the best prices each day.

Not to worry. BookBub is doing just fine. But with its need to get readers to buy the books that it wants them to buy even if they’ve never heard of the title or the author before, it does present a real contrast in mission with our BookGorilla upstart.

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you already know what that contrast in mission is all about. Although BookGorilla certainly continues to sell all the ad-supported spots it makes available, it remains true that fewer than 20% of all the books recommended by BookGorilla are ad-supported. That leaves us free to pick the best deals at the best prices each day, and to remain true to our mission, which is to provide readers with books they had already wanted to read at prices they never dreamed possible.

-Steve Windwalker

Amazon Announces the Biggest Game-Changer Yet in the eBook World:

READ FOR FREE with Kindle Unlimited

News

 

By Steve Windwalker
 
Amazon has done it again, and as usual, the winners are readers.

This morning the company launched Kindle Unlimited, which after a very nice 30-day free trial will allow readers unlimited reading or listening from among over 639,000 Kindle Books and over 2,000 Audible.com audiobooks. The service will cost $9.99 a month after the free trial, and one easy way to understand what’s being offered is that it’s like “Netflix for ebooks.”

While we expect the catalog of books, author and publishers participating in Kindle Unlimited to blow past the million-title mark this year and continue to expand, the selection even at launch is pretty dazzling. This morning we selected seven titles to include in our daily BookGorilla email alert, just to give our readers a taste of the kind of top-tier, A-list bestsellers that are available absolutely FREE during the free trial:

  • The Hunger Games By Suzanne Collins
  • Capital in the Twenty-First Century By Thomas Piketty
  • War Brides By Helen Bryan
  • Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt By Michael Lewis
  • That Summer Night (Callaways #6) By Barbara Freethy
  • Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel By Jonathan Safran Foer
  • The Best Medicine (A Bell Harbor Novel) By Tracy Brogan

Winners and Losers

We’ll be watching closely to see what new titles become available, but based on what we see already it seems likely that Kindle Unlimited will be as big a disruptive force for “business as usual” in the publishing world as the Kindle itself has been. We will no doubt continue to see misguided analyses claiming that Amazon will be competing with this, that and the other existing service, but any such “competition” will likely be akin to the centuries-old competition between the hammer and the nail: usually, one doesn’t even get to hear the nail say “ouch.” Nobody is in a position to compete with Amazon on this terrain.

Amazon seems committed to a pretty generous royalty structure for enrolled titles, which we think will ultimately amount to about $2 a copy for authors who participate in its KDP Select program. Given recent negotiations — and the Hachette stalemate — between Amazon and some large publishers, we wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what share those publishers and their associated authors might receive, but publishers who stay on the sidelines may find themselves in an untenable position — both with their authors and with their own corporate bean-counters — as the Kindle Unlimited catalog grows.

For people who read a lot, Kindle Unlimited is going to be awesome. We won’t talk ourselves blue in the face trying to persuade you beyond noting that the seven very popular titles listed above would currently cost you $66.15 in the Kindle Store without Kindle Unlimited. After all, we think all of us will make better use of our time looking for great books to download FREE.

It’s probably silly of us to take any pleasure in having predicted this program almost exactly six years ago on pages 90-91 of the paperback edition of The Complete User’s Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle, and we didn’t get it exactly right, anyway. We called it Kindle Buffet, said it would be a Kindle reading subscription plan “on steroids,” and we were way off on how such an offering would be priced: we said it could cost as much as $50 a month. My, how things have changed!

Start your free 30-day trial today here.

Here’s the guts of Amazon’s press release from earlier today:

Introducing Kindle Unlimited: Unlimited Reading and Listening on Any Device–Just $9.99 a Month

Date(s): 18-Jul-2014 7:30 AM

Read freely from over 600,000 books–available on Kindle devices, as well as free Kindle reading apps for iOS, Android and more

Listen to thousands of audiobooks from Audible, or switch easily between reading and listening with Whispersync for Voice

Enjoy best sellers including the Harry Potter series, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Hunger Games trilogy, Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, and Flash Boys

The most cost-effective way to enjoy audiobooks such as The Handmaid’s Tale, Life of Pi, and Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Start a free 30-day trial today

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jul. 18, 2014— (NASDAQ:AMZN)–Amazon.com today introduced Kindle Unlimited–a new subscription service which allows customers to freely read as much as they want from over 600,000 Kindle books, and listen as much as they want to thousands of Audible audiobooks, all for only $9.99 a month. Finding a great book is easy, and there are never any due dates–just look for the Kindle Unlimited logo on eligible titles and click “Read for Free.” Customers can choose from best sellers like The Hunger Games, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and The Lord of the Rings, and with thousands of professionally narrated audiobooks from Audible, like The Handmaid’s Tale and Water for Elephants, the story can continue in the car or on the go. Kindle Unlimited subscribers also get the additional benefit of a complimentary three-month Audible membership, with access to the full selection of Audible titles. Kindle Unlimited is available starting today and is accessible from Kindle devices or with Amazon’s free Kindle reading apps. Start your free 30-day trial today here.

“With Kindle Unlimited, you won’t have to think twice before you try a new author or genre–you can just start reading and listening,” said Russ Grandinetti, Senior Vice President, Kindle. “In addition to offering over 600,000 eBooks, Kindle Unlimited is also by far the most cost-effective way to enjoy audiobooks and eBooks together. With thousands of Whispersync for Voice-enabled audiobooks to choose from, you can easily switch between reading and listening to a book, allowing the story to continue even when your eyes are busy. We hope you take advantage of the 30-day free trial and try it for yourself.”

Kindle Unlimited features include:

  • Unlimited reading: Access over 600,000 books including best sellers like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Harry Potter series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, Water for Elephants, Oh Myyy! – There Goes The Internet, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, All the King’s Men, Wonder Boys, Ask for It, The Princess Bride, The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts, The Atlantis Gene, Kitchen Confidential, The Sisterhood, Crazy Little Thing, The Blind Side, and The Giver, plus thousands of classics such as Animal Farm, To the Lighthouse, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cat’s Cradle, and The Good Earth, as well as books featuring beloved children’s characters from Sesame Street, and useful reference titles including books from the For Dummies series and Lonely Planet travel guides.
  • Unlimited listening: Keep the story going with unlimited access to more than 2,000 audiobooks from Audible with Whispersync for Voice, and switch seamlessly between reading and listening to customer favorites like the Hunger Games trilogy, Life of Pi, The Handmaid’s Tale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, The Great Santini, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Winter’s Tale, Boardwalk Empire, El Narco, Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies, Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog, The Finisher, Johnny Carson, The Stranger I Married, and Life Code.
  • Kindle exclusives: Choose from hundreds of thousands of books only found on Kindle, including Brilliance by Marcus Sakey, The Hangman’s Daughter series by Oliver Pötzsch, War Brides by Helen Bryan, Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct and Matthew Hope books, When I Found You by Catherine Ryan Hyde, Whiskey Sour by J.A. Konrath, Chasing Shadows by CJ Lyons, and Sick by Brett Battles.
  • Short Reads: For a quick escape, select from thousands of books that are 100 pages or less, including Kindle Singles from Stephen King, Andy Borowitz, and Nelson DeMille, and short fiction from Amazon Publishing’s StoryFront imprint.
  • Free three-month Audible membership: In addition to the thousands of professionally narrated audiobooks from Audible included in Kindle Unlimited, subscribers get a complimentary three-month Audible membership, with access to more than 150,000 titles.
  • Popular Kindle features: Enjoy all the great Kindle features customers love such as Whispersync, Popular Highlights, X-Ray, customer reviews, and Goodreads integration.
  • Read and listen everywhere: Access across Kindle devices and free Kindle reading apps for iPhone, iPad, Android tablets and phones, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and Windows 8–so you always have your library with you and never lose your place.