There are now more than 180,000 ebooks in the Kindle Online Lending Library (KOLL), according to Amazon. That’s still a fairly small percentage of the total number of ebooks available, but it shows that plenty of authors still haven’t given up on the use of KDP Select as a means of boosting the visibility of their work.
When KDP Select launched, many authors claimed that they saw a definite upswing in sales following a free promotion period. That window of opportunity seems to have faded away (perhaps by design?), but KDP Select clearly still has value for authors offering books as part of a series. Then there’s the matter of royalty payments for borrows, which have hovered around the $2 mark lately.
Amazon remains very stingy when it comes to figures for Prime and KDP Select. The pot in recent months has been $600,000, and with borrows each being worth around $2, that suggests there have been around 300,000 Prime members borrowing books each month. As noted yesterday, Amazon is clearly hell-bent on pushing Prime as a kind of all-in entertainment hub, and this is where the company can be expected to make some big developments over the next year or so.
In a couple of months, KDP Select will reach the end of its first year and Amazon will have to set the scene for Year Two. It’ll be interesting to see what, if any, changes they make. Assuming that KDP Select remains central to Prime, and Prime remains central to Amazon, you might assume that Amazon will perhaps up the number of free borrows available for Prime members (’cause one per month does seem a little tight). The problem for Amazon is that many authors seem uncertain about remaining in the scheme; drop the royalty pot, and the number of enrolled books might fall, thus preventing Amazon from bragging about the number of KOLL books. Amazon’s next move in this regard might tell us quite a lot about their long-term plans for KDP.
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