Amazon has announced they’ve started winding down Kindle Vella, and they plan to put an end to it entirely in February of 2025.
If you’re wondering what Kindle Vella is, you’re not alone. Amazon first rolled out Kindle Vella in July of 2021, and the serialized platform has failed to catch on. Not unsurprisingly, most people aren’t interested in reading books one “episode” at a time, for books that aren’t even completed yet in most cases.
The whole setup was convoluted and laden with gimmicks from the beginning. Stories were only published one episode at a time, and you had to buy tokens to unlock new episodes. Amazon seemed to place more emphasis on the social aspects than the actual stories themselves.
One of the weirdest things about Kindle Vella was the fact that the stories weren’t available at all on Kindle ereaders; you had to use one of Amazon’s apps or read from a web browser. I guess they figured it wasn’t worth the time to add support for Kindle ereaders, and it turns out they were right.
Amazon says that customers will be able to retain all stories and episodes that they unlocked for free or using tokens, and they will still be accessible from Kindle apps after Kindle Vella closes, but they will no longer be available for reading on the web.
Amazon is encouraging people to cash in any unused tokens now, because after December 4th you won’t be able to buy any new tokens and new episodes will no longer be published on the Kindle Vella platform.
Amazon says they’ll “reach out” in February if you still have any unused tokens, at which point they’ll automatically credit your account balance with an Amazon.com gift card in an amount equal to the value of your remaining tokens.
See the Kindle Vella FAQ on Amazon’s website for more details.
I wasn’t intrigued by the concept, and my one deep dive into Vella was because of a special Amazon ran in 2022, offering ebook credit if you downloaded one of the stories. I found the service hard to navigate and eventually settled on a story, rather then pick something that actually interested me. I haven’t bothered browsing since.
It does say something that I cannot find a lot of information about how readers felt about Vella. I see a lot from an author’s POV, saying how they don’t like how they get paid or how stories are featured and promoted, hurting their sales.
Serialized story telling is nothing new. It is a solid form of publishing stories. the problem I found with Vela when I tried it is all the stories I looked at sucked. I only looked at a handful for the reaching achievements, but was very disappointed by how boring the stories are. This is why it failed. It didn’t make to to the devices because it did require to be connected online and has interactive parts to it that I bet the kindle devices are not written to handle.