There's no such thing as "free on Kindle Unlimited"

(or when does Kindle Unlimited become worthwhile)

Lets be a little silly today. I see lots of authors advertising their books as being 'FREE on Kindle Unlimited'

It's a LIE!

Readers pay a monthly fee to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited. £7.99 per month if you live in the UK. ($9.99 in the US)

So how much does that work out per book? Let's make some assumptions and I'll do some math/s for you. 

Assumptions

• You are a super-fast reader who reads at 400 words per minute. That's about twice normal speed.
• You read non-stop for 12 hours per day, 30 days per month. That leaves you 12 hours a day to sleep, eat and do anything else you need to do.
• We'll take an average book as being 305 pages and about 61,000 words. I actually measured 50 Kindle Unlimited books and got an average length of 400.7 pages - we will take the mean which is 305 though.
• We'll assume an average page has 200 words. (it actually varies between 200 and 250 words)

Based on that you would take 162.5 minutes to read a book. lets round that down to 2.5 hours.

Each day you would read 4.8 books. Each month that's 144 books.

So each book will cost you £7.99 / 144 or a little more than five pence per book (about $0.07 US) That may be a very small amount but it's NOT free.

Of course would you really read 144 books a month? How much time do you actually spend reading each day? Are you a much faster reader than normal?

Now I read quite a lot. The last time I checked I read 55 books in a year. A little more than one book a week on average. If it's a really good book I might read more (I read all three of the Angriest Angel books at one book a day, 1589 pages) but would it be worthwhile for me to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited? The table at the right tells me that if you, as an individual, read less than four books a month then it's not worth it.

However if your family reads a lot and you share an Amazon Kindle account then yes - subscribe to it.

Of course there is one time when Kindle Unlimited is free. When you take up their offer of a 30 day free trial.

Asto all those 'FREE on Kindle Unlimited'  posts - What you really mean is 'Available on Kindle Unlimited.'