An Introduction To Amazon Prime Reading

In a previous article about ways to read books for free and still legally, I mentioned Amazon Prime Reading as an option. This week, Sophie from glowsteady.co.uk gives us an insight in her experience with the service. She describes herself as "a plant based recipe developer and beauty lover based in North East England." You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Did you know that you can read for free with your Amazon account? Prime Reading seems to be a perk that a lot of people don’t know about, and I think everyone should. I only discovered Prime Reading towards the end of 2018 and very quickly became obsessed. Here's everything you need to know about how it works.

What is Prime Reading?

We've kind of already established that it’s an Amazon service available to anyone who pays for Prime. Prime Reading a free service which allows you to download eBooks for free every month. You can add up to 10 books to your library at any time and new titles are being added to download all the time.

Most importantly, you do not need a kindle or ereader to use this service. You can access the books directly from your Amazon account online, so it’s accessible for everyone.

What I Love About Prime Reading

It's free

Obviously, the fact that it’s free (well, the cost of Prime) is a huge perk. Prime is £7.99 in the UK, the cost of one book probably. Using Prime Reading you can download as many books as you like for that price, saving you a great deal. This is also great if you’re wanting to branch out into new authors or genres, if you’re not enjoying something, you can easily return it and pick something else.

It's not just books 

As well as books, you can also read some magazines for free. Granted, it’s not Vogue, but you can pick up magazines for certain interests like Runner’s World and Homes and Garden.

Easy to use

When you go to the Prime Reading section, it shows you a selection of new titles, another selection of recommended titles based on your previous titles and a non-fiction section. This makes it really easy to choose a book quickly if you don’t have time to browse through everything. But if you do want to browse, that’s really easy too. You can go by genres, new releases, or star rating.

New titles 

So far this sounds a lot like a library doesn’t it? It’s free, you borrow and return your books. But you actually get newly published books available on Prime Reading. When I finished my first book, I was a little confused when I saw it didn’t have many reviews on goodreads. I went back to Amazon to double check I was looking at the right title (my memory is not great) and saw that the book I'd just finished had only been published two weeks prior.

You can read it anywhere

As you can access on a kindle, through an app, or the desktop version, you can read it just about anywhere. It’s great for travelling without books taking up too much space and it’s really portable. If you start reading it on an ereader, you can still access the book from the same place if you use another device so you don’t even need to take your ‘book’ out with you to be able to read it.

It helps me read more

This could be a personal thing, but as I’m usually looking at a screen anyway, I feel more inclined to pick up my book when I can access it from the same screen. However, that also brings me onto the more negative side.

The not so great part

Your eyes

This could just be me, but I really like the feeling of a book in my hand. It's nice to switch off from a screen every once in a while, especially as most of us spend all day looking at one. As much as I love Prime Reading, I couldn’t rely on it all the time for this reason.

The choice

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to choose from and I’ve never gone looking for a book and not found one that sounds appealing. But if you compare the Prime Reading library to every single book available on Amazon, obviously Amazon has pretty much everything.

Overview 

• It's free
• There’s lots of choice
• Great for travel
• Good way to try something new
• Not so great for those trying to reduce screen time
• There aren’t as many options as there are to buy a physical book

I may have already mentioned this once or twice, but I'm a big fan of the service and as someone who already had Prime, I think it’s a great way to try new things. Even if you wanted to try Prime just for this service, you can read several titles a month for roughly the cost of one book. It will never fully replace physical books for me, but it’s something I'm very glad I have access to.

Have you ever tried Prime Reading? What do you think of the service?