As mobile devices and e-readers turn more and more people towards ebooks and audiobooks instead of paperbacks, its only a matter of time before competition between “all you can read” services heats up. People who like reading books in digital format would love to have a huge digital library at their fingertips for just a few dollars per month, kind of like the on-demand music streaming services everyone seems to love these days. Amazon might have something for us along these lines in the near future. The company is reportedly testing a new monthly unlimited ebook subscription service called Kindle Unlimited.
Test pages for the new service were first spotted by the eagle eyes users at Kindle Boards but Amazon quickly took them down. But since this is the internet and not really disappears once it comes online, the pages are still available through Google Cache.
The test pages reveal that Kindle Unlimited will offer users over 600,000 ebooks and audiobooks on any device for $9.99 per month. The home page lists several popular titles categorized by genre and include popular series like Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and The Hunger Games.
Amazon Prime subscribers already have access to a lending library with over 500,000 titles but there are two caveats. Subscribers can only borrow one book per month and can only read it either on a Kindle device or one that can run a Kindle application.
Kindle Unlimited will pit Amazon against the likes of Oyster and Scribd which offer a similar service. Amazon has so far not commented on this report so it is unclear when it plans on launching Kindle Unlimited.