Kindle Unlimited vs Kobo Plus vs Scribd (Everand) for Self-Published Authors
Ebook Subscription Services—from the Self-Published “Indie Author” Perspective
Some authors—especially first-time authors—are leery of subscription services. Others are simply uninformed.
As a book publishing coach who has helped dozens of authors successfully navigate this process, I often encounter this.
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So let’s look at the three best digital subscriptions for ebooks: KU, Kobo Plus, and Everand (formerly known as Scribd).
(In late 2023, Scribd changed the name of its “reading & knowledge” platform to Everand. In this article dated November 8, 2023, Draft2Digital explains the change and what it means for authors. More on that later.)
You may be wondering:
As an author, does enrolling in a ebook subscription app hurt sales?
according to Tara Robinette, Director of Operations for book distributor Draft2Digital, in Self-Publishing Insiders #126: Subscription Based Reading Services, who was speaking on Kobo Plus at the time,
“[What] our data has shown us is they are two separate readers. A Kobo reader is not a subscriber and a subscriber is not an ebook buyer. They’re two separate readers so you’re kind of reaching two separate markets. You’re not going to see one siphon sales from the other. You’re going to be reaching a new demographic of readers who either only like to buy and own their ebooks on their device or those who prefer to be subscribers and filter through a ton of books at a time.”
Do subscription services drive down sales and devalue books?
There seems to be a misconception out there that subscription services devalue books, “reducing what people are willing to pay for the books,” according to Robinette.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth, because
“there’s this group of readers” out there, who “is not going to buy your book—they’re just subscribers. . . . They want that deal. They want . . . anytime access. They’re probably pretty voracious in their reading habits.”
How do ebook subscription services benefit authors?
Subscription services offer “a way [for authors] to capture revenue from a group of readers that you otherwise would not ever have any access to and would never made any money from.”
The subscription-based platforms all use a recommendation engine that looks at purchase history, browsing history, and reading activity, and then suggests material it thinks the user will like.
Many readers are more willing to take a chance on new books and unknown authors, too, because for one monthly fee, they’ve got virtually unlimited access to any ebooks that pique their interest.
Subscription services appeal to readers of romance books, mystery and thriller books, and, increasingly, I find, self-help and how-to books. Authors of books and series in these genres would do well to take note.
Yet for authors who are self-publishing (or who have self-published titles out there),
there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about how subscription services work—for the author—and a lot of hesitation to embrace them, which means that readers are being lost and money is being left on the table.
These three happen to be the most popular and have nearly all of the market share:
Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU), Kobo Plus from Rakuten Kobo, and Everand (formerly known as Scribd)—
Below is information about each so we can compare and contrast and understand how it all works and what it all means for self-published indie authors—especially ebook authors.
Amazon Kindle Unlimited (KU)
Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, or KU for short, is Amazon’s subscription-based ebook reading platform. It was launched in July 2014.
KU books can be read on Amazon Kindle devices, through the Apple or Android apps, or through a Mac or Windows desktop computer.
Where is Kindle Unlimited available? What countries?
Kindle Unlimited is available to customers in 12 countries.
“Kindle Unlimited is currently available only to US customers on Amazon.com. Customers in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, India, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Canada and Australia can sign up for Kindle Unlimited in their local Amazon marketplace.”
The Chinese Kindle Store closed on June 30, 2023, with downloadability of purchased books scheduled to stop after June 30, 2024.
How much does Kindle Unlimited cost?
The price of a monthly Kindle Unlimited membership increased from $9.99 to $11.99 USD plus tax on May 11, 2023. The new price applied to customers after June 18, 2023, on the date of their next renewal.
Some folks are paying less by buying themselves 2-year gift subscriptions or getting in during special promotions.
A 30-day free trial is available.
How many books are available in Kindle Unlimited?
There are 3,000,000 ebooks available in KU. Full magazine subscriptions are also available.
There’s a catch: Many traditionally-published books are not available to KU readers. Readers can “borrow” only 20 eligible Kindle Unlimited Titles at a time. (Magazines don’t count towards the borrowing limit.)
KU for authors
Your book must also be available on Amazon in order to be available for KU.
You must opt in to Kindle Unlimited by enrolling in KDP Select. There is no cost to enroll. Here are the KDP Select Benefits.
In most cases, an author must (or should) publish directly to Amazon using Amazon KDP in order to have books enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.
Your ebooks must remain exclusive for 90 days at a time. It is possible to opt in to and out of KU—but your ebooks can’t be listed anywhere else—and it can sometimes be a challenge to get them delisted once they have been published widely.
KU payments/royalties for authors
Payment is per KENP page read—the standard ebook page based on the standard formatting settings based on the monthly rate for the reader’s country—from the KDP Select Global Fund.
I’ve written all about the KDP Select Global Fund and how it works and have a graph that shows its payout; it’s one of the most popular articles on my site.
Historically, the KDP Select Global Fund for Amazon.com has averaged 45 cents per 100 pages read.
That may not seem like much. And despite the recent KU membership increases, authors are not seeing any higher royalties. This won’t affect most authors much, but do note that there’s a 3,000-pages-read limit per customer per book.
Authors may be eligible for additional bonuses and promotions that could yield additional earnings.
Read Royalties in Kindle Unlimited for more.
If you’re a traditionally-published author, your book probably won’t be available on KU, but Amazon has arrangements with some traditional publishers. In the nonfiction space, The History Press/Acadia Publishing is one such example.
When do you receive your KDP royalty payment?
According to When Will I Get Paid page, you’ll receive your payouts 60 days after the end of the month in which the sale was reported. By direct deposit, it takes 1 to 10 business days to land in your account.
As the Payment Thresholds page points out,
“EFT Payments do not have a threshold. This means you'll be paid electronically in full no matter the amount accrued.* For Check and WIRE payments, there is a minimum threshold in each marketplace after deducting the applicable tax withholding. Your royalties accrue separately for each Amazon marketplace.” “*Note: When converting local royalty earnings to a different currency and/or withholding any applicable tax, the amount to be paid after conversion/withholding must meet the minimum amount banks will allow us to send. . . .”
Kobo Plus
Kobo Plus is a subscription service of Rakuten Kobo Inc., or Kobo for short. Kobo is a Toronto-based subsidiary of the Japanese company Rakuten. Kobo is an anagram of book.
Kobo Plus launched in 2017 and has expanded ever since.
In a review of Kobo Plus for Tech Radar, Sharmishta Sarkar reported that
“there’s a huge number of romance novels on Kobo Plus, and there’s some erotica too. If that’s your jam, there’s plenty to keep you busy.”
Kobo Plus books can be read on Kobo ereader devices, through the Apple or Android Kobo apps, or through a Mac or Windows desktop computer.
Where is Kobo Plus available? What countries?
Kobo Plus, the subscription service from Rakuten Kobo, is available to readers in more than a dozen countries.
Kobo Plus is available in the following areas:
Canada, the US, the UK, Australia (through Booktopia), Belgium, Italy (through Mondadori and Feltrinelli), France (through Fnac), Netherlands (through Bol.com), New Zealand (through Booktopia), Portugal (through Kobo Plus e_LeYa), Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Kobo Plus’s rapid rate of expansion has been impressive; in April 2023, Kobo Plus opened to US and UK subscribers. In November 2023, Kobo Plus expanded to Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. In February 2024, Kobo Plus became available in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
How much does Kobo Plus cost?
Readers can subscribe to Kobo Plus Read (ebooks) for $7.99 US/$9.99 CAD per month. A subscription to Kobo Plus Listen (for audiobooks only), costs $7.99 per month plus tax. And a combined Read and Listen subscription for both ebooks and audiobooks costs $9.99 US/$12.99 CAD plus tax. FWIW, some say that the audiobook library is limited compared to other audiobook platforms.
By comparison—Kobo Listen vs. Audible: an Audible Membership plan starts at $7.95 plus tax per month.
A 30-day free trial is available. The free trial period is 14 days in France. There is no free trial available for Quebec residents.
Readers can add as many ebooks as they want to and are not limited to 20 as they are with KU. (A maximum of 15 titles can be read offline during the free trial period.)
How many books are available in Kobo Plus?
1,300,000 ebooks and counting are available—
Kobo Plus has bigger-name authors and publishers in its program than KU.
Kobo Plus for authors
Your book must also be available on Kobo in order to be eligible for Kobo Plus.
There is no cost to enroll.
There is no exclusivity requirement. You can opt in or out of Kobo Plus at any time. As Kobo notes,
“it is easy to opt out of Kobo Plus, or out of specific territories in which Kobo Plus operates. Opting out will in no way impede readers from buying your books à la carte.”
“While you’re enrolled in Kobo Plus, you can distribute your books to any other online bookseller that you wish! There’s no exclusivity requirement to be in the program.”
Self-published authors can access Kobo Plus by publishing directly to Kobo Writing life. This is the best way to maximize earnings.
For convenience, it’s also possible to use an ebook distributor to do that. IngramSpark, StreetLib, and Draft2Digital, for example, distribute to Kobo Plus.
If you’re a traditionally-published author, your book(s) may or may not be available on Kobo Plus.
How does Kobo Plus pay authors?
Your royalty share is based on a formula that takes into account the Minutes Consumed—the combined number of minutes read by paying subscribers in a given month.
Read and attempt to make sense of it yourself in the KWL Helpdesk article How does Kobo Plus Pay and the Kobo Writing Life Terms of Service.
Kobo Writing Life says:
“Your payments for Kobo Plus are based on the amount of time that subscribers spent reading your titles in a given month.”
Each month, we take the total revenue (we'll call that Monthly Revenue) earned from Kobo Plus subscriptions. We also take the total minutes that all subscribers spent reading that month. (Minutes Read). We divide the Monthly Revenue by the Minutes Read, which allows us to assign a monetary value to each minute of reading (let's call it Value per Minute Consumed). This value will fluctuate month to month based on subscriber number and total reading time.
Let's look at an example. Imagine we have 100 subscribers paying 9.99 a month each. Our total revenue for that month is 999. Let's imagine that those subscribers spent an average of 2 hours a day each reading. 2 hours a day for 30 days is 3600 (120 * 30 = 3600). So 100 readers spent a collective total of 360,000 minutes reading on Kobo Plus that month.
In order to pay our authors, we calculate the value of one minute of reading time. 999 divided by 360,000 =0.0027 (Monthly Revenue/Minutes Read = Value per Minute Consumed). The payment rate for authors on KWL is 60%. This means that for every minute a reader spends reading your book in this example, you earn 60% of 0.0027. A book that takes a reader 3 hours to read would therefore generate 0.2916 (180*0.0027) * 0.6) in earnings.
In our sales reports, we report minutes read in measures of 300 minutes. In the example above, this would come out to 0.81 cents per 300 minutes of reading time. These blocks of 300 minutes are how these will be reported in your monthly subscription sales report.
As Kobo notes on its Kobo Plus FAQ help page,
“Now, authors will be paid for every minute read, including re-reads, and even if a reader reads less than 10% of the book. Unlike KU, there are no limits on re-reads, and unlike [Everand], even if the reader reads just a few pages, you’ll be compensated.
If you remove books from Kobo Plus, Kobo Plus subscribers who have already checked that book out will still be able to access it—indefinitely, it seems. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears that you would still be paid at the Kobo Plus rate if/when they read your book.
You will NOT be paid for any reads that take place when a user is in their Kobo Plus free trial period. Bummer!
And payments vary by Territory (and are converted into your local currency before being paid to you). You may notice, for example, that when someone reads your entire book in Canada, you might make more money than when someone reads your entire book in Belgium.
When do you receive your Kobo Writing Life payments/royalties?
When do you get paid?
“Kobo will make payment to you and provide associated sales reporting on a monthly basis, with all payments and reports to be made within forty-five (45) days following the end of the applicable month. Kobo may accrue and withhold payments until the total amount due is $50 CAD.”
Also, payments are based on converted currency.
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Everand (Scribd)
Everand began as Scribd (pronounced “scribbed,” which rhymes with “fibbed”), in 2007, as a document sharing service. It has seen rapid growth in recent years.
In late 2023, Scribd changed the name of its “reading & knowledge” platform to Everand.
In this article dated November 8, 2023, Draft2Digital’s Lexi Greene explains the change:
“According to Scribd’s website, the company has separated its content to make it easier for readers to find what they want. Everand is where readers can access ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, magazines, newspapers, sheet music and more.”
“Scribd will remain the name of the corporate entity and massive digital library for things like legal documents, manuals and academic papers. The company also offers SlideShare, where readers can download professional material, such as presentations and infographics.”
Everand is a great value for readers, it reaches a global market, and it includes traditionally-published books from Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and other big-name publishing houses, as well as self-published titles.
Everand books can read through the Apple or Android apps, or through a Mac or Windows desktop computer.
Where is Scribd/Everand available? What countries?
Evernad can be accessed in any country—unless it is blocked by providers or governments. Everand has more than 1,000,000 monthly subscribers in 100 countries.
However, as Everand explains in its Help Center,
“in many cases book publishers have international sales agreements which prevent their titles being offered everywhere.” Readers will still be able to access previews of books, though.
How much does Everand cost?
To subscribe it costs the reader $11.99 plus tax, which gives them access to ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, documents, and sheet music.
A 30-day free trial is available.
How many books are available in Everand?
As of August 2021, more than 2,000,000 ebooks, 300,000 audiobooks, and 1,000,000 magazine and news articles were available on Everand.
Thus numbers must be much larger now (I first wrote this article in late 2023 and have subsequently updated it), but I cannot find any updated information.
Everand for Authors
Authors can learn more about Everand on the My Books on Everand or Everand for Authors pages.
A few things stand out about Everand:
Readers can stumble upon your book easier, based on personalized recommendations.
As Everand subscriber/indie thriller author/Draft2Digital Director of Marketing and PR Kevin Tumlinson observes, Everand does a great job of prompting readers to go back and finish books that they’ve added to the list.
There is a catch. At the time of this writing, individual self-published authors cannot publish their book directly to Everand as they can with KU or Kobo Plus.
According to the Everand Help Center,
“[I]f you’re a self-published author looking to be included in Everand’s subscription library, we’d love to have you too! All you need to do to get your books in our library is to share your work via one of our publishing partners—Smashwords, INscribe Digital, BookBaby, Draft2Digital, or Findaway Voices—and your book will be available on Everand for our subscribers! You do have to work with one of those publishing companies, however, and we apologize that we are not accepting individual authors directly on Everand at this time.”
Put another way, if you’re a self-published author, to get your books for sale on Everand’s, you’ll need to use one of Everand’s publishing partners.
If you’re a traditionally-published author, your titles may or may not be available on Everand.
How does Everand pay authors?
Everand does not pay authors directly, and that information is not available in a Everand account.
Because authors can only publish to Everand through an approved publishing partner, author royalties depend upon preexisting agreements between Everand and the said distributors. Inquire with the distributor you use.
Similarly, the frequency, minimum thresholds, and timing and method of payout all depend the distributor you use.
Draft2Digital’s cut, for example, is 15% of net royalties.
Draft2Digital says that Everand pays 60 percent of the list price—once the first 20 percent of the book has been read. (Everand shows the first 20 percent of the ebook as a free preview.)
How much money can authors make?: KU vs. Kobo Plus vs. Everand
Let’s say I have a 200-page ebook, 60,000 words, that is read cover-to-cover.
On Amazon’s KU, I would make, in a typical month, $0.90 each time the entire book is read. That’s based on the KDP Select Global Fund payout rate of $0.45 per 100 words. (And again, for more successful authors, there may be additional bonuses available on top of that.)
On Kobo Plus, the payout depends on how long it takes to read the book. Let’s assume a book is read for 6 hours. In that case, using Kobo’s own example, I would make $0.94 if publishing directly through Kobo and less if publishing through a distributor.
And remember, earnings vary from month to month and from one reader location to the next on KU and Kobo.
On Everand, distributing through Draft2Digital, I would make 60% of the list price—if they read past the first 20 percent of the book. For a $4.99 ebook, I would make $2.99.
Keep in mind, however, that there are fewer readers on Kobo and Everand than there are on Amazon, at least in the US.
24symbols
There is another digital reading subscription service out there that I’d like to mention briefly: 24symbols. Yeah, it’s spelled like that, not 24 Symbols.
Based in Madrid, 24symbols launched in 2011 at the London Book Fair.
It was and still is geared toward featuring backlist titles primarily for readers in Europe and South America.
I didn’t see any books from well-known North American publishers on 24symbols.
Since I only work with American authors, and that is the publishing landscape I know, I will refer you to this 24symbols Review, from BookRiot, and will keep my comments on 24symbols brief.
24symbols books can be read through the Apple or Android apps or on an ereaders with a modern web browser installed on it.
Where is 24symbols available? What countries?
As far as I can tell, 24symbols books are available in at least 10 languages.
How much does 24symbols cost?
$8.99 USD per month, plus tax.
How many books are available on 24symbols?
There are 500,000 ebooks and audiobooks on 24symbols.
24 Symbols for authors
Like Everand, 24symbols can be reached only through a distributor.
How does 24symbols pay authors?
Like Everand, all royalty-related details depend on 24symbols’ arrangements with their publishing partners.
Let’s sum up: book subscriptions and self-published ebooks . . .
Making a book available for check-out in a subscription service can help authors attract readers and make money from those readers that they wouldn’t otherwise.
A little about each one of your best options as an author:
Amazon KU is a good option for authors who want to keep things simple, who want to go all in on Amazon, or who perhaps don’t expect to sell many ebooks or who don’t expect many readers outside of the US.
Kobo Plus is a contender for authors with readers where Amazon is not as popular or not available. With Kobo Plus, you can reach regions you can’t with KU. Kobo plus requires no exclusivity.
Everand is a contender for authors who are publishing their ebook through a distributor and who would like a shot at attracting a more global audience. It’s low risk, possibly low reward, too, but it’s worth trying.
24symbols may be worth keeping an eye on—especially for authors looking to attract Spanish/European/South American readers, but isn’t a major player just yet.
You should definitely consider, as an author, opting in your books to digital subscription apps.
What are you waiting for?
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