I am trying to save money at the moment, and it occurred to me that if I read 137 books last year that meant I had paid for most of them, and that is quite a bit of money.
Now I’ve always wanted to own the books I’ve read but on the other hand I read almost everything on my Kindle, and that is more like borrowing the book anyway.
I don’t mind because I like the convenience, I love the feeling of the Kindle in my hands, it stays open and flat so I can knit while reading without a problem, and this is the only way to carry around several hundred books in my purse.
Also if I want a new book I just click – and there it is.
I don’t have to go to the bookstore, see when it’s open, convince the saleswoman that yes, the book I want does indeed exist, and that she should order it for me, and then wait for two weeks until they phone me that it’s actually there. Which is a kind of improvement because it used to be that books in English took four to six weeks when ordered. If it was possible to order them from here at all.
Plus ebooks don’t need shelves.
So I thought to myself that I was reading a whole lot of non-fiction these days and those books are way expensive, and most of them I won’t be re-reading anyway. I could save a ton of money if I got Kindle Unlimited. All the books I want for ten Euros a month.
So I signed up. The first month is free. Then I pulled out my “buy later”-list of book titles.
I looked them all up in the store. All 43 of them.
You know how many of those were on Kindle Unlimited?
Two.
Yep. Two of 43. The books on Kindle Unlimited that I wanted to read were “Tommy Black and the Staff of Light” and “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.
So I checked those two out (and a few days later “Supercharge Your Kindle Sales”) and quit.
I still get to read those books for free (even though I later decided to actually buy the “7 Habits”-book because I’m sure I will want to re-read it at some point.) but I had the feeling that paying 10 Euros a month for tat service wouldn’t actually save me any money.
Pity. I really liked the idea.