Amazon's Kindle Unlimited isn't lived up to its name yet
Amazon announced Friday its new Kindle Unlimited service, which allows customers to read an unlimited number of e-books for $9.99 per month. Essentially, Kindle Unlimited is to books as Netflix is to movies. It’s a potentially a game-changing new platform, could be deeply disruptive to the publishing industry, and will likely divide authors in the same way that music streaming divided musicians.
Although there are 600,000 e-book titles to read via Kindle Unlimited, there are still a vast number of great books you can’t read if you sign up. That’s because a number of major publishers, including Penguin, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster have not made their books available on the service.
Are the big publishers opposed to Kindle Unlimited? Or is the availability of their books on the service contingent on renewing contracts with Amazon? The major publishers have not yet publicly taken a stance on Kindle Unlimited and did not return TIME’s requests for comment, so for now, we don’t know. But it’s probably safe to say that Kindle Unlimited’s success will be defined by the number of books the big publishers make available.
For now, here are ten great books that still aren’t available on Kindle Unlimited (some of them were taken from our list of All-TIME 100 Novels):
1. Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
2. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
3. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
4. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
5. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
6. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
7. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
8. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
9. The Circle by Dave Eggers
10. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt