Cover via Amazon
Over the next couple week I am going to be shifting my strategy on Free Book posts. Last week Amazon announced their Kindle Direct Publishing Select program. This is going to make several big changes to the whole ebook landscape.
1) Amazon is moving toward a book subscription model. This program is primarily about Amazon offering your book for free through their Kindle Lending Library for Prime Members. The $79 a year Prime membership allows you to stream movies (like Netflix), get free two day shipping and the ability to borrow one book a month for free. There is a lot of speculation that this will grow into a regular Netflix style subscription model.
2) The most controversial aspect of the Select program is that the author has to give Amazon exclusive access to their books. This will probably limit the Select to mostly independent authors. A few small publishers might join, but likely very few. While virtually everyone agrees that Amazon dominates the ebook market, it is not the entire ebooks market. So authors will be loosing out on income from Barnes and Noble, Apple, Google Books and other ebook stores. The question is whether there will be increase income from increased visibility on Amazon enough to balance out the loss of income from other stores.
3) One of the features of the program that I initially missed is the ability for authors to have their books be free for everyone (not just Prime members) for 5 days every quarter. This is a big deal! Amazon has a bit over 1.2 million books (not public domain). If 1% of those books participate in the Select program, then that is 12,000 books. Then if those Select authors evenly distribute their free 5 days (which they probably will not) then there will be around 130 new books a day for free, every day. Only a year ago, it was normal for only about 30-40 free books a month to be offered. It is not about 100-200 a month on average. If this takes off it could be 2000-3000 free kindle books a month.
So the change in strategy. Up until this point I have posted pretty much everything that was available for free on kindle format. I skipped the erotica and short stories and promotional excerpts, but in general I posted everything that was available. There are several services that will continue to do that (ireaderreview.com, ereaderiq.com and booksontheknob.org are all better and more complete than I am on posting everything.)
I started posting because I was interested in the free books myself and wanted to share what I found. But I now have literally hundreds of books I have picked up that I will not ever have time to read.
So I am going to start focusing on posting books that I think really look interesting to me and the readers of Bookwi.se. My areas of interest are primarily Christian books, Young Adult Fiction, History and some general non-Fiction and some mainstream Fiction. These will be my primary focus. I will not be able to read all of the books that I post prior to recommending them, but I will try to skim reviews and only post those books that seem to be high enough quality to be worth reading.
If you have a particular type of book you like to read, post it below and I will try to include it in the daily post. My current goal will be to post 5 books a day that are worth reading. Primarily these will be grouped by genre. Let me know what you think. Do this seem like a good strategy?
That sounds like a good strategy. Could definitely use some help finding the good stuff if the deluge of (what appears to be largely low quality) free books over the last few days continues.
I’m mostly into Christian non-fiction and general/academic non-fiction. Some of the personal development stuff I’ve gotten free has also been quite worthwhile
Just got a new kindle fire for Christmas. woo hoo!! I like Christian fiction and historical novels. can’t wait to get started. Love it!
I prefer fiction novels. I usually end up with mainstream fiction just because I tend to follow the masses out of a lack of knowing what is good. What type of fiction I read depends on my mood. I like comedies, thrillers, and books about dogs. I’m really excited about using my new kindle fire. I assume that you have a Prime membership. Do you also have a netflix membership? It has occurred to us that we might want to cancel our netflix membership and go with a Prime membership (we would save $16 a year). I’m not sure how I would view amazon movies on our tv downstairs.
If it were just me, I would probably drop netflix and just use prime. But Amazon prime videos are not that easy to navigate and do not have as many cartoon as Netflix. The girls watch netflix on the ipad a lot.
You can stream Amazon Prime on a Roku box. Should be able to find one around $40 or $50.
Thanks for the advice. We actually have a roku box on our TV upstairs. We really enjoy it.