Starting this month, Amazon Prime memberships have a new feature: Prime Reading. Under this program, the $99 Prime subscription now includes free access to over one-thousand e-books, comics, and magazines. The content on offer will rotate, hopefully encouraging subscribers to read more and eventually purchase additional e-books.
While a useful addition, the new perk likely won't bring in droves of new members the same way as other popular services, such as Prime's unlimited, two-day shipping or the Prime Day shopping holiday.
However, all the additional reading sparked by Prime Reading could help drive more sales of e-books, a market Amazon helped birth and still dominates. Also, Prime Reading may serve as a gateway to get more of Amazon's loyalest customers to sign up for Kindle Unlimited, Amazon's $10 monthly reading service that includes over 1 million books and thousands of audiobooks. Using a similar tactic, Amazon last month introduced a slimmed-down, free-for-Prime version of its paid audiobook services called Audible Channels. A full Audible membership costs $14.95 a month.
In addition to Prime Reading, Amazon will continue to provide the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. That Prime service lets people borrow one e-book a month from a much wider selection of hundreds of thousands of titles. Unlike Prime Reading -- which can be used with Amazon, iOS and Android devices -- the lending library is only available on Kindle and Fire devices.
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OK, let's try it out on my Fire Tablet.
Go to Books. Select Store. Select NEW! Prime Reading.
There are several categories.
New & Notable: 15 titles.
Current Magazines: "Every month we choose a selection of top magazines for you to borrow as part of your Prime membership." There's some good stuff here, such as Smithsonian Magazine, New York Magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, Slam, Money, House Beautiful, Real Simple, The Atlantic, Good Housekeeping, Woman's Day, The New Yorker. It remains to be seen how many of these will be offered next month. I chose to try Money Magazine, but found it a little hard to read on my tablet. My eyes ain't that good any more :(
Science Fiction & Fantasy: 96 titles including Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone.
Nonfiction: 432 titles, including The Millionaire Next Door and Life Hacks. I chose Habit Stacking. Do Less sounds interesting. Let's try that one too.
Mystery & Thriller: 173 titles.
Romance: 163 titles.
Comics & Graphic Novels: 21 titles. Including The Complete Peanuts Vol 1: 1950-1952, and 14 Years of Loyal Service in a Fabric-Covered Box: A Dilbert Book. OK let's try the Dilbert.
Business & Money: 15 titles. The Million Next Door and Habit Stacking are categories here.
Children's Books: 73 titles. Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone is listed here.
Teen & Young Adult: 55 titles.
Kindle Singles & Singles Classics: 23 titles. Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma might be interesting.
Interestingly, when you open up the book the first time, it doesn't start at the front cover. But rather at the introduction.
You can't zoom in when reading the books, so you're stuck with the font size. However, you can zoom when reading magazines. I guess it's big enough for me to read with my freebie reading glasses, but it's a little blurry.
Now that I'm looking at the Dilbert book, the strips appear tiny when they first appear. Tap on them and they become a little bigger. Double-tap on a strip and it appears on it's own screen. From there you can zoom in to read it.
Exit out and try to read another book. My tablet locked up with a black screen. :(
Power off. Turn back on. OK, seems to work now.
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