Hello Lovelies,
As you’ve probably surmised, today’s post will be about Kobo Plus and Kindle Unlimited and how the two differ. These two subscriptions are both much alike and nothing like the other. I’m gonna compare the two, so you’ll hopefully get a better understanding of them and know which better suits your needs.
First, let’s start with the free trial
As many other subscription services, both Kindle Unlimited and Kobo Plus have a free trial period where you can check out the subscription and figure out if it’s something for you. They do it in very different ways. No, not for the readers. For the authors.
Authors in Kindle Unlimited get paid for the pages read by anyone using the free trial because Kindle Unlimited roualties are paid from the total pool of money made on the subscriptions per month. KU takes this pool of money (the Global Fund) and then they divide the money between the authors corresponding to how many pages in their books have been read.
Kobo Plus on the other hand? They don’t pay the authors whose books have been read during someone’s free trial. Now, you might think that’s completely bonkers (maybe a little?), but Kobo has a very valid point in doing it this way. You see, there’s a bunch of scammers that use the free KU trial to ‘read’ books, either their own, or those of whoever hired them, or maybe even the person they want to get banned from publishing with Amazon. What does this do exactly? It makes the person whose book they’re ‘reading’ earn more money without anyone having to pay for the KU subscription.
Kobo has decided to combat this scam by just not paying the authors for the free trials. Is this good or bad? That’s debatable, really. Is it good to stop scammers? Yes. Is it great for authors? No, probably not. One thing, though, if you’re a smaller/newer author in Kobo Plus, you’re not likely to be the reason someone tries out the free trial. That will most likely be a bigger author whose bottom line won’t be as affected by it.
Let’s move on to how they decide what to pay
Kindle Unlimited pays per page read whereas Kobo Plus pays per time read. You’re probably thinking: but people read at vastly different speeds? Won’t the authors earn less that way, then? The answer is… maybe? It really depends.
If you have two people reading the same book and one reads it faster and the other slower than the ‘norm,’ the author ends up getting paid as if both readers read it at normal speed. An example would be that the average reader spends 1 hour reading the book whereas the fast reader only spends a ½ hour and the slow reader spends 1½ hours. If you add the slow and fast readers time it’ll be 2 hours and if you divide those hours by the 2 readers, you get an average time of 1 hour per reader which is the same as the average reader. I think this is the basis for why Kobo believes their system is fair.
I’ve tried to show how a slow reader and a fast reader combined will average the same time as the average reader in this image.
Is Amazon’s pay-per-page model any better? Well, there’s no time limit. There is however the risk of authors getting banned if readers scroll through the book faster than their average reading time (yes, Amazon tracks your time). If you want to know more about how that can happen, you can read my blog post about how Kindle Unlimited actually works.
There is also this pesky little thing where authors have no control over how many pages Amazon deems that their ebooks are. You have absolutely no say in the matter. Amazon chooses how many pages they think your book is in what they call KENP pages. The reason they have to do this is that unlike paperbacks and hardbacks, ebooks don’t have a set amount of pages. The length of an ebook changes by how zoomed in or out you make the text. This is why you won’t find a page count at the bottom of your ebook. There’s a percentage and a location instead.
Exclusivity. Why, Amazon? Why?
You might not know this, but in order for authors to put their ebooks into Kindle Unlimited, those ebooks can not be for sale anywhere else (this does not include paperbacks). The tradeoff for this is that once every KU period (90 days) you can schedule a sale without having to go in and manually change your prices and you’ll still earn your 70% royalties despite the sales price being below the threshold. If you price your ebook under 2.99 USD, you will only get paid 35% royalties and from 2.99 – 9.99 USD you’ll get paid 70% and anything over 9.99 USD is again 35% royalties. Amazon is doing this because they want to keep ebooks cheap.
You might have seen ebook boxed sets with four or five books and a price of 9.99 USD and thought that was quite a steal. The truth is, authors would make less by upping the price to what the boxed set is actually worth and so, 9.99 it is.
Back to exclusivity. Kobo Plus has none. Wuhu! You can have your ebooks in Kobo Plus and anywhere else you want (except for KU but that’s because of Amazon).
How many books can you read?
Kindle Unlimited is limited. You can only have up to 20 KU books downloaded at a time; that number used to be 10 for a long time. In Kobo Plus the limit is 15 books at a time. These are the number of books you can have downloaded to your device. As long as you return books, you can download as many as you want while you’re subscribed.
You might be wondering what happens to those books if you cancel your subscription. The answer is that you lose access to them. This, of course, does not apply to any ebooks you have bought.
Can anyone get a subscription?
Both Kobo and Amazon only have these subscriptions available in certain countries but unlike Amazon, Kobo is expanding their reach. Amazon don’t seem to be expanding Kindle Unlimited to any more countries which I think is a shame.
These are the countries each subscription is available in at the time of writing this blog post:
Kindle Unlimited
- USA
- Canada
- Mexico
- UK
- Brazil
- Japan
- India
- France
- Italy
- Germany
- Spain
- Australia
Kobo Plus
- Canada
- USA
- Australia
- New Zealand
- Portugal
- Italy
- India
- France
- Netherlands
- Belgium
- Taiwan
- Hong Kong
- Ireland
- South Africa
- Denmark
- Finland
- Norway
- Sweden
- Switserland
- UK
- Spain
As you can see, Kobo Plus is available in far more countries than Kindle Unlimited and they’re still expanding! That’s one thing I really like about Kobo Plus! Their availability is *chef’s kiss*
How much do authors actually make?
Neither Kobo Plus nor Kindle Unlimited pays particularly well when you take into account how much a whole book should be worth (it’s sad, really). An average novel earns less than 1½ USD per book read in KU and for Kobo Plus it’s even less.
Here are the plusses and minuses that I feel are important to note when choosing between these subscriptions.
So which should you choose?
Obviously, the decision is yours to make. Depending on which country you’re in, you might not even have both to choose from. Kobo Plus costs less but also have fewer books in their catalogue. Kobo Plus is available in far more countries, but Kindle Unlimited is much more likely to have new releases.
There are different pros and cons to both Kobo Plus and Kindle Unlimited (as shown above) and it’s up to you out there to figure out what best fits your specific needs and wants. I only hope that after reading this you have a better idea of the differences between the two, so you might have a starting point whether you’re an author or a reader. I also wanted to share this so you as a reader might have a better understanding of the author’s point of view when it comes to choosing how you consume your books!
Thank you for reading along as we dove into the world of subscription services for authors and bookworms! I hope you found this comparison useful and learned something valuable about Kobo and Amazon! If you have any thoughts or questions on this topic, feel free to share them in the comment section below.
Until next time!
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