Amazon is having another 1-day sale on select Kindle ebooks for one of their main Deals of the Day.
This time the deal takes up to 80% off a list of New York Times best sellers.
There are 41 books on the list, with lots of highly-rated, popular titles.
Most are only $1.99 to $2.99, a few are as high as $4.99, so they’re definitely worth checking out at that price.
Amazon has also extended the sale on the Kindle Paperwhite Kindle Unlimited bundle deal.
The offer includes 6 months of Kindle Unlimited for free with the purchase of a Kindle Paperwhite (use the “add both to cart” button below the main picture on the product page for the Paperwhite).
Last week they showed the deal ending on Friday, but now the fine print states the promotion will last through July 30, 2017.
A subscription for Kindle Unlimited costs $9.99 per month so with 6 months free it’s a savings of $59.94. If you’re planning to get a Kindle Paperwhite you might as well get the bundle and get unlimited reading material for the rest of the year. It’s a good gift idea too instead of just giving a Kindle where the person has to spend their money to load it up with books in order to use it.
So which do you suppose isn’t doing well, Kindle Unlimited or PaperWhite sales? My guess is the latter, seeing as how Amazon announced that they’ll be introducing a new version with 8x the storage, later this year. In short, they WordStarred themselves; the reference being to the leading word processing software, pre-Windows.
WordStar evidently got the bright idea to generate enthusiasm for their new product by announcing it ahead of time. Only problem was, that announcement was way premature and folks, of course, stopped buying the current version; waiting for the new one. What with the cash flow problem this caused, WordStar didn’t have the money to finish that new version and the result is why nobody under the age of 30 has ever heard of WordStar. Of course. a coupla other things — like spaghetti code in the old version and competition called Microsoft — also played a role but *that* was the final nail in the coffin.
Moral of the story? Loose lips — and slowness to market — sink ships … and PaperWhite sales, apparently; such that they’ve gotta give away a $60 benefit to generate $120 in sales. Worse is their loss down the line as KU customers no longer need buy content for their Kindles. Add the backend that Amazon has to pay to KU authors and they’re probably paying a *lot* of money to buy these new customers.
All this is just a drop in the bucket for the Amazon machine, of course, but there’s probably a division head somewhere who isn’t real happy, right about now.
I remember Wordstar for CPM and DOS… seemed every office was using it and then a bit later WordPerfect and then mostly MS Works….
Amazon has announced no such thing. It sounds like more made up rumors. Amazon doesn’t announce a new product without putting it up for pre-order. Besides, 32GB Paperwhites already exist in Japan for manga and comics since the file sizes are a lot larger. Most people could care less about having that much storage space. That’s like 25,000 ebooks worth; it’s just ridiculously impractical. And the best sellers list at Amazon shows the Paperwhite is still the best selling Kindle. In fact it’s even one spot ahead of the new Fire HD 8, so I doubt they’re struggling to sell them.
I want to know what happens to all the books we download after our subscriptions run out? Do they take them back? Do they mysteriously disappear?
What I mean is in 6 months I could download the whole Library of Congress if I had enough bandwidth and the storage capacity.
Obviously you don’t get to keep them. That’s kind of the point. It’s more like renting than buying, but for fiction what’s the point of owning a bunch of books you’ve already read? They only let you have 10 titles downloaded at once anyway. It’s unlimited reading, not unlimited downloading.
Well Dang, Thanks for clarifying this for me. I think the same about paperbacks; I have stacks of them lined up on walls that I’ll never read again, but for some reason I can let them go and there they sit taking up space, where as on 16-32 Gigs an SD they wouldn’t take up hardly any space at all and I wouldn’t have to worry about giving them away 🙂
I assume Amazon are giving away the 6 month Unlimited deal because they want to shift their Kindle Paperwhite stock ahead of new Kindles at the end of the year.