The plus-ification of subscription services continues unabated with Amazon becoming the latest company to follow suit with a Kindle Unlimited rebrand. The subscription service is now known as Kindle Plus but will continue to offer unlimited access to a select collection of ebooks, comics, and magazines from the Kindle catalog for $11.99 per month. Thousands of those titles will also still have access to companion audiobooks so you can switch back and forth between reading and listening exactly where you left off, but Kindle Plus will expand that access to include “virtual voice” audiobooks read by AI narrators, according to ZDNet.
“The subscription continues to offer the same great reading experience with access to millions of titles, now with the addition of thousands of audiobooks in the U.S. catalog at no extra cost,” Amazon spokesperson Josh Pflug told The Verge in an emailed statement.
Kindle Plus will remain a standalone subscription that’s separate from Amazon Prime, and users will still be limited to borrowing up to 20 titles at once, but with no return dates. Amazon is now also allowing authors using its Kindle Direct Publishing platform to make their audiobooks available to Kindle Plus subscribers.
Virtual voice audiobooks will automatically be available as new titles are enrolled in KDP Select, but authors can opt-in to AI narrators for previous published titles, too. For authors who prefer a human narrator, audiobooks created using Audible’s Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) marketplace will now also be available through Kindle Plus, but starting with subscribers in the US. Amazon plans to expand availability to other markets over time.