Freading and Kindle Unlimited

Last week when I logged into my library's Freading.com web site, I saw a bunch of new books from Open Road Media, including the Cadfael medieval mysteries. Most of those books are tagged "coming soon", though. A quick search online found that the Cadfael books will be released on 5 August, so I'm anticipating that their status on Freading will change on that date. Even nicer this week, I found that many books from RosettaBooks have been added to the catalog, and almost all of those are available right now. And, RosettaBooks is carrying a number of well-known authors such as Barbara Taylor Bradford, M. C. Beaton, Kurt Vonegut, Ben Bova, Harold Robbins, and Harry Kemelman.

On 18 July, Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited, a subscription service. One thing I've discovered about Freading and Kindle Unlimited is that there is a major overlap between the books which are available from the two different channels. Freading doesn't cost ME anything, because my library pays for the service. Kindle Unlimited will cost me $9.95 per month after a 30-day trial period.

Granted, the catalogs for the two are not identical, but as I said, there's a great deal of overlap between the two. Freading has the price advantage, but doesn't allow me to read on my Kindle device. I'm lucky enough to have a second reader (a BeBook mini) which is supported by Adobe Digital Editions, so I have reasonable access to the books from Freading. The advantage of Kindle Unlimited is that it supports my Kindle reader, but the downside is the price. I think that for now, I'm going to pass on Kindle Unlimited and get the books I want to read from Freading.