Amazon renames Kindle Unlimited as Kindle+ and adds AI-read audiobooks

Amazon has renamed its Kindle Unlimited subscription as Kindle+. The price stays at $12 a month. The more noticeable change is that more audiobooks are now part of the plan, and some of them are read aloud by AI voices instead of human narrators.

What changed

Kindle+ is a rebrand, not a new subscription. You still get unlimited reading from an eligible Kindle catalog. You can still borrow up to 20 titles at once. It remains a separate subscription from Prime.

The new part is listening. Amazon is expanding the audiobook category inside the plan. The idea is that you can keep going with a book through audio after you put your Kindle down. You will see a wider mix, from traditional narrators to books made with Virtual Voice.

How the AI narration works

Virtual Voice is Amazon's AI narration service. It is free for authors in Kindle Direct Publishing, the program that lets writers self-publish ebooks on Kindle. Those authors can enroll in Kindle+ and are paid for pages read, not per download. Their earnings depend on the month's payout rate and total pages read.

Because the voice costs authors nothing, some may skip hiring a human narrator. The ZDNET writer who covered the news notes that this could cost professional narrators work, and many of them have followings of their own.

Who it affects

• Current Kindle Unlimited members: same price, same borrowing limit, more to listen to.
• Self-published authors: a free way to offer an audiobook version.
• Professional narrators: more competition from a free AI option.
• Listeners who prefer a human voice: some titles will now sound different.

What to do

Listening on Kindle is not new. Kindle devices and the Kindle app have supported it for years. Some Kindle Unlimited ebooks already came with a professionally narrated audiobook, though not all. Accessibility tools such as Assistive Reader and VoiceView can also read text aloud.

If you want human-narrated or fully dramatized audiobooks, ZDNET says Audible and other platforms are still the better place. Libby, which works through your local library, is another option. The material does not say how many AI-narrated titles are in Kindle+ or how they will be labeled.