One of the pitfalls of subscribing to Kindle Unlimited is discovering the good books available to download. The Amazon Bookstore on the Kindle e-reader and the website don’t do an excellent job of recommending good books. The company has recently unveiled a new Discover tab on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited website. It lists a bunch of bestsellers that people have recently downloaded, and I can confirm that these are books that generally sell for the total price individually and are on many bestseller lists.
Kindle Unlimited Discover doesn’t just list many books you might want to download and then sync to your Kindle. On the main Discover page are two sub-tabs: Genre and More. Genre lists the primary genres that someone might want to search for, such as mystery, romance, autobiography, fantasy and science fiction. Once you click on a genre, it will list many popular books, but you can also further isolate your search by selecting a sub-genre. This will only provide books you would like to read in various genres. This will assist readers in e-book discovery, which is hampered by the 100,000 titles available on Kindle Unlimited.
Clicking on More will allow you only to show books by starred ratings, so if you click on five stars, it will only list books where most people have rated a specific book very high. You can also sort by popularity, checked by default, but sort by alphabetically is also available.
I do not know how “new” the e-book discovery section is on the Kindle Unlimited site on Amazon. It says “new” next to the other tabs, such as Overview, Kindle Originals, and Series. I only saw this on the Kindle Unlimited site when looking for any available deals. Amazon recently sent me an e-reader to review, and I opted into three months free of Kindle Unlimited in Canada.
The entire discovery feature is outstanding. Searching for “biographies” and then “memoirs” actually gave me results I would like to see since the person typically better researched and sanctioned memoirs.
Visiting the website is the only way to discover new books you want to read. The system is only on the website, at least in Canada, the United States, and other markets. However, it would be good if Amazon were ported to the discovery engine on the Kindle and Fire tablets. Suffice it to say that discovering new books directly on the e-reader is haphazard at best.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
