“Someone explain how buying on KU works to me, please?”

I’ve seen this asked in my various bookish groups on facebook often enough that I felt it warranted a post. It’s shocking to me how many people don’t understand how KU works.

With Kindle Unlimited, you don’t buy, you borrow.

This post was last updated on February 14th, 2025. Information below is subjected to change at any time.

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Wait, what is KU, anyway?

KU is the abbreviation for Kindle Unlimited, used most often in the bookish community. Kindle Unlimited is a program that Amazon offers for it’s ebooks.

So, how does Kindle Unlimited actually work?

Kindle Unlimited is kind of like a combination between Netflix and your local library. You pay the subscription fee, like with Netflix, to access the titles on KU. With the active subscription, when you find the books you want to read, you borrow them like you do with the public library. You can borrow 20 books at a time, and once you’ve downloaded them, even if they are removed from the program, you can still read them.

How much does Kindle Unlimited cost?

You can get a KU subscription for $11.99 USD/month + any applicable taxes. Bonus, you don’t need an Amazon Prime subscription to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.

How come I have to buy [book title] when I already have a KU account?

While you can purchase any books that are a part of the Kindle Unlimited program at any time, if the book doesn’t have the option to borrow it, then it’s not a part of Kindle Unlimited. While there are thousands of books in the KU program, not all books fall under it.

What’s the difference between buying a book on Amazon and borrowing it with KU?

You don’t buy books with Kindle Unlimited, you borrow them. You don’t get to keep them and until you return them, you can’t borrow anything new past your 20 book limit.

When you buy a book on Kindle, You “own” the digital format of that book. It’s similar to purchasing a digital download of a video game. You don’t truly own it, just the rights to use it. If Amazon ever goes out of business, then you would lose all access to your purchased Kindle book. Of course, that brings us into the debate on physical versus digital, which is another conversation entirely.

What are the “Prime First Reads” and “Prime Lending” I keep hearing about?

These are not at all connected to Kindle Unlimited and are part of another service entirely. These are accessed through having an Amazon Prime subscription, which includes the shipping, video, music, and more features within the program.

Prime First Reads is a bonus within the Amazon Prime subscription that allows subscribers to purchase a free newly released title from a preset selection of books. Usually there are eight or so to choose between. Some months, you will have access to a second novel or a bonus story (which is generally quite short). If you are not an Amazon Prime member, you will have access to these same titles for $1.99 USD. Once the month ends, these titles will increase in price, so it’s a wonderful time to buy any that you are interested in. Unfortunately, you can only purchase one of the novels at the $1.99 price point, and if you are a Prime member, you get the one novel for free and any others you want will be at the increased price point.

Amazon Prime Reading is a lending feature. With an Amazon Prime membership, you have access to over a thousand titles that you can borrow from. These titles change every month or so, but can include a wide variety of titles, many of which may never be a part of the Kindle Unlimited service. There is a limit of 10 titles borrowed at a single time, and similarly to KU, if the title leaves the program, you can still access the book until you’ve returned it. Prime Reading titles do not count against your Kindle Unlimited titles, so with subscriptions to both programs you have access to a full 30 titles at any given time.

The Amazon Lending Library was often mistaken for Amazon Prime Reading, but they are completely different services. Unfortunately, Amazon Lending Library was discontinued. The service was the precursor to borrowing library books through Amazon and the Prime Reading service. With it, you could borrow a single book a month and were able to “keep” that book. While you didn’t own the book, you were able to download it to read again at any time once it had been borrowed, so it was similar to owning it. However, when the service was discontinued in 2020, access to those titles went away.

There was another aspect to the lending library, that allowed you to lend a book you had purchased to a friend for no charge and allow them to keep access to it for 14 days. This service was discontinued in 2022.

How do authors get paid when you borrow with KU if you aren’t buying their books?

Let’s allow an author to explain this, since they have first hand knowledge:

A portion of the cumulative KU subscription fees from all the available countries goes towards the KDP Select Global Fund, out of which a royalty rate is paid to enrolled authors on a per-page basis. The royalty rate fluctuates each month, but is roughly around $0.004 per page, which means, for every book of 300 pages, the author receives approximately $1.20 each time somebody reads the book from start to finish. Yeah, it’s not a lot. 😕

Amanda Kai, Author

It’s also worth noting that, while you can re-read any KU title as many times as you’d like, the author only gets paid for the first read through. If you like the book enough to re-read it and are able to do so, consider purchasing either the ebook or even the printed copy to enjoy again and support the author.

What if I don’t finish the book? Does the author still get paid? Should I thumb through it to the end anyway?

As seen above, the authors are paid per page, so you don’t have to finish the book if you don’t want to. Amazon’s system know what pages are indexes, dedications, author info and the like. Their system only pays for the pages with actual story on them, so skipping other pages is fine. If you, say, have a book that is a DNF (Did Not Finish) for you, you can flip through the rest of the book to count the pages to help pay the author more, but you have to be careful on that. Kindle calculates your reading speed and uses that to prove you’re actually reading. If you were to just skip through the book, your pages wouldn’t be counted. You have to actually turn the pages based on your reading speed or the service will refuse to count it. While it’s a nice thought to finish out a book for the sake of an author, when you consider that a read earns them a mere $1.20 per person, it’s really not worth finishing for them. You’d be better off just returning it and using your time more wisely by reading a different book.

Is Kindle Unlimited worth it?

This really depends on the person. I’ve found that if I read 4+ Kindle Unlimited titles a month, the subscription more than pays for itself. I admit to paying for it for nearly a year and a half and not reading a thing from it. I resolved to read more books from the program and in the process read enough books from KU last year to essentially give me 9 months free.

How do I return a KU book?

There are a few ways you can return your book to Kindle Unlimited.

The first way to return your Kindle Unlimited titles, is to visit the KU management page. You can visit that page at any time at: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/ku/ku-central/

From this page you can manage your subscription, return currently borrowed titles, see how many titles you have presently borrowed, and see returned titles. There is a nice big “Return” button next to your books that you can select to return the books you are finished with.

If you are anything like I am, you will either borrow a billion titles at once or forget to return them upon completion because you sort your Kindle by Unread so it just disappears behind the filter once you exit the completed novel. When you try to borrow another title, it will inform you of your gluttony and ask you to return a title before borrowing the next. The above image shows what this looks like on the browser, but it’s not much different within the app or on the Kindle devices.

What happens to my borrowed books if I cancel my subscription?

You lose them. Kinda. The books you’ve borrowed will be automatically returned to the program and removed from your account. This is where is gets technical. If you leave your Kindle on airplane mode, the books will remain there until you connect to wifi and sync your device again. This would allow you to borrow the full 20 books and stop paying for a period of time until you could finish reading them in the event you want to use the service but know you can’t take advantage of the service. Keep in mind, as Amanda explained above, the subscriptions feed into the bulk fund which authors are paid for, so continuing to pay for the service is the best way to support the authors, but even they understand that our economy is horrible and reading is an expensive hobby. You do what you have to do.

That being said, it’s best to have an active subscription when you once again sync your device. There was a bug some time ago, where if you synced without an active KU subscription, the author wasn’t paid for your read. While this was supposedly fixed, it’s apparently been reported to still happen on occasion. I’ll admit, I have no idea how anyone is able to tell, but there you have it. Rumor or not, if you wish to support the author, it’s a better safe than sorry situation. Your device does time stamp when you did your reading, so waiting to sync until the global fund is larger won’t make a difference. Amazon knows how much the fund is and will retroactive the pay to what it was when you did your reading, so the amount the author receives won’t alter based on you waiting to sync until you have a subscription either way.

If you end your subscription and then return to it again after some time, the titles will have been returned. You will need to borrow these again once you start your subscription again. I’ve had the titles still borrowed upon missing a few months, and I’ve had them all returned and need borrowed once more after missing a few months, so just assume they will be returned and need borrowed once more if you cancel your subscription and don’t bother to leave your device on airplane mode to retain access to the titles you’ve borrowed.

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Sound great? Get your own Kindle Unlimited subscription here!

Do you have Kindle Unlimited? How many titles do you read from it each year?