this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
66 points (95.8% liked)

Science Fiction

13567 readers
15 users here now

Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction

December book club canceled. Short stories instead!

We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.

  1. Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
  2. Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
  3. Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
  4. Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
  5. Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.

Lemmy World Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Tenthrow
66
Have any of you found Kindle unlimited worth it for science fiction? (self.sciencefiction)
submitted 1 year ago by AFKBRBChocolate to c/sciencefiction
36 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In the last few months I've read:

  • Project Hail Mary, Weir
  • Fall, Stephenson
  • The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Gaiman
  • The Ultimate Earth, Williamson
  • The first four Discworld books, Pratchett
  • Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge, Resnick
  • A Memory Called Empire, Martine
  • A Desolation Called Peace, Martine
  • The first five Murderbot Diaries books, Wells
  • The Imperial Radch trilogy, Leckie
  • Annihilation, Vandermeer
  • The Kingston Cycle trilogy, Polk

For comparison, I think I read two or three books last year. It's starting to be a non-trivial amount of money, even though they've all been the ebook versions, which are generally a little cheaper. Has anyone who reads a lot of SF found Kindle Unlimited to be worth the price?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ForeverAGnome 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not OP but I have both Libby and Cloud Library because I have library cards for 2 different libraries. I default to Libby but if they don't have the book I'm looking for I check Cloud Library. Both are really easy to use though. There's usually a wait-list for new/popular books, but sometimes your library will acquire additional digital copies. It'll tell you your expected wait time and how many people are in front of you.

[–] AFKBRBChocolate 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds worth checking into. Not really anything to lose, right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Absolutely worth checking into IMO. If your e-reader device does support library connections, so much the better, but if not, your phone/tablet will.

In addition to e-books, your library also likely offers access to other services including streaming. I have access to Kanopy, which has an interesting catalog of movies and shows that is well outside the mainstream. I've found some interesting stuff on there to consume even though I don't use it as often as Netflix/Apple/etc.

Regarding Libby and the Palace Project, I used Libby for some time but shifted to Palace after reading (here, here) about the e-book lending market space and how ripe for enshittification it is at present. (Overdrive, the company behind the app of the same name and the Libby app, was recently sold to private equity firm K.K.R., notorious for horrible business practices. Overdrive controls about 90% of the library lending market, so I'm a little fearful for what might come.) The Palace Project is a non-profit, so I'm supporting it as a competing platform in case Overdrive starts to tank. The Libby app is more polished, but the search, borrowing and reading experience on Palace is largely comparable and still just fine.

[–] AFKBRBChocolate 1 points 1 year ago

Thank you, I appreciate the thoughtful response. I'll check into it.