Michael Crider
Most people think of Amazon’s Prime subscription service as that thing that gives you free shipping and some streaming TV. And it is. But it also includes a staggering amount of extras for your $79 $99 $119 a year. One of these is access to a bunch of free Kindle books and magazines, under the label Prime Reading.
Welcome to Quick Tips, a series where we offer tips and tricks that aren’t necessarily new but may have gone under the radar or otherwise not be well known.
Prime Reading is not to be confused with Kindle Unlimited, which is a subscription service (separate from Prime) with a much wider selection of books. No, Prime Reading isn’t as big or as varied as Kindle Unlimited, but it’s still a very big collection of books and periodicals—more than any single person could get through in years of reading.
It’s not just the cast-offs of the Kindle world, either: popular YA titles like Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl are in there, chart-toppers like Monster by Walter Dean Myers, plenty of sci-fi and fantasy, tons of cookbooks, self-help, classic literature, and nonfiction. There are even some popular comics, like Batman: Year One, a few kid’s books, and free magazines including Men’s Health, Vanity Fair, and Smithsonian. For a few short-form stories (notably a series of Dean Koontz mysteries) you can get free narration via Audible.
You can read all of these on your Kindle or Fire device if you have one, but you don’t have to. They’re available via the Kindle app on iOS or Android phones or tablets, or even on a standard web browser via the Kindle Cloud Reader. Just read fast: because they’re freebies, there’s no guarantee that any particular book will stay in Prime Reading forever. And if you let your subscription to Amazon Prime lapse, you’ll lose access to those books, too—you’ll have to reup or buy them individually.
