Today Amazon announced the arrival of Kindle Unlimited in Canada. It’s surprising that it has taken this long considering it first launched last July in the United States.
Amazon has been steadily rolling out their ebook subscription service internationally for the past six months. Other countries that have Kindle Unlimited access include the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, France, Brazil, and now Canada.
The service costs CDN$9.99 a month, and it comes with a free 30-day trial (except for Quebec residents for some reason).
Amazon is highlighting best sellers like the Harry Potter series, the Hunger Games trilogy, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Interpreter of Maladies, Flash Boys, The Giver, Wonder Boys, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Good Earth as being offered in the program.
Interestingly, Amazon advertises more titles available through Kindle Unlimited in Canada than the US. On the US site they say KU provides access to over 700,000 titles; on the Canada site they say KU offers over 750,000 titles. The actual numbers shown on the list for each is over 846,000 in Canada and 862,000 in the US, so who knows what the real story is. Needless to say, not very many big-name publishers have agreed to let Amazon offer their books in the program.
One big exclusion in the Canadian Kindle Unlimited program is audiobooks. The KU service in the US and UK also includes several thousand audiobooks. The audiobooks sync with the ebook copy for Whispersync for Voice and Immersion Reading, but those features aren’t available in Canada for some reason.
When you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, you can read the ebooks on any Kindle devices or with any Kindle reading app, including apps for iPad/iPhone, Android, Windows, and BlackBerry. There’s also the Kindle Cloud Reader for reading using a web browser.
The way the service works is subscribers get unlimited access to all the ebooks available through Kindle Unlimited. However, you can only have a maximum of 10 titles downloaded at once. You get access to all the ebooks in the program—plus notes, highlights, etc—for as long as you pay the monthly fee, but once you cancel Kindle Unlimited you lose all access to the ebooks you downloaded unless you purchase them.