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Amazon has renamed its Kindle Unlimited reading subscription to Kindle Plus, keeping the monthly price at USD 11.99 while expanding its audiobook catalog to include titles narrated by artificial intelligence.
The rebranded service still offers unlimited access to a selection of ebooks, comics, and magazines from Amazon's Kindle catalog. The expanded audiobook selection includes thousands of additional titles in the United States, giving subscribers more ways to access books without paying extra for the new features.
The biggest change is the addition of audiobooks created using Amazon's AI-powered ‘virtual voice’ narration technology. The service already offered companion audiobooks for thousands of ebooks, letting readers switch between reading and listening and resume where they left off.
With the expansion, subscribers will have access to more audio content, including AI-narrated books. Amazon has not changed the subscription's core pricing or borrowing limits as part of the rebranding.
“The subscription continues to offer the same great reading experience with access to millions of titles, now with the addition of thousands of audiobooks in the U.S. catalog at no extra cost,” Amazon spokesperson Josh Pflug told The Verge in an emailed statement.
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Kindle Plus costs USD 11.99 per month, the same price as Kindle Unlimited before the rebranding. Subscribers can continue borrowing up to 20 titles at a time, with no return deadlines.
The service remains separate from Amazon Prime, so customers don't need a Prime membership to subscribe. The changes expand the available content without altering the existing subscription's basic structure.
Amazon is also expanding audiobook access for authors publishing through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). New titles enrolled in KDP Select will automatically include virtual-voice audiobooks, while authors can opt in to AI narration for previously published books.
For those who prefer human narration, audiobooks produced through Audible's ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange) program will also be available to Kindle Plus subscribers in the US market. Amazon plans to introduce the audiobooks to other markets in the future, but it has not released an exact timeline for this initiative.
The expanded audiobook catalog is initially available to subscribers in the United States. The company has said it will expand access to other markets in the future.
This way, Amazon can extend its reading service beyond ebooks and traditional books. By offering both AI-read stories and human-read audiobooks, Kindle Plus will offer extra audiobook options each month.
The new program will also provide authors with more options to share their work. The rebranding reflects Amazon’s desire to merge reading and listening services into a single subscription.
