Do Free Ebooks With Amazon Prime Expire After Cancellation?

Question

Just canceled my Prime membership. Those free Kindle books I borrowed through Prime Reading – do they disappear from my library after the subscription ends, or can I keep reading them?

Phyllis Cummings Clayborne · Answer

Titles you've downloaded as free eBooks through Prime Reading will remain on your Kindle and in your Library even after your free trial or subscription has ended. However, you will no longer be able to read them once your subscription has ended. If you are looking for titles to keep long after your subscription has ended, there are many platforms that sell eBooks for prices in the $2-5 range that you can buy and keep for good. For example, Rejecting the Prince's Mate is a completed werewolf romance eBook where the protagonist, defiantly, rejects her fated bond and instead of happily ever after, triggers a pack war.

Evelyn · Answer

As someone who has delved deep into Amazon Prime’s free ebook service, I wanted to outline how the free books through Prime Reading work. They are lendable for as long as you’re a Prime member, but when you cancel your Prime membership, the books in your library will disappear. The only exception to this rule is the free book handed out through the First Reads program to Prime members every month. Those downloaded books will remain on your Kindle FOREVER, even after you’ve cancelled your membership.

So another subscription for books is Kindle Unlimited. Similar to Prime Reading, this is also a subscription service where you can borrow books, and then they are removed from your library when your subscription is cancelled. Again, Prime Reading is wonderful for discovering new authors. But, for permanent access to a book, you should purchase the ebook or get a First Reads pick.

The value of Prime to heavy readers will depend on how much they get out of the book benefits included in the subscription. I find the selection is good enough to make the subscription cost worth it, even though I have no due dates to worry about.

Nora · Answer

This program also offers a ton of free ebooks through Prime Reading, which is a big plus. Note, however, that if you cancel your Prime membership, you will no longer have access to any books you received for free through Prime Reading. These are borrowed sort of like from a library and expire with your membership. However, any ebooks you actually purchase (even at a deep discount) will remain in your library forever. This is a big plus, and a great reason to buy ebooks even when they are offered at a deeply discounted price. Prime Reading is a great extra for people with active Prime memberships.

Roman · Answer

As a digital book hoarder, I tested this out. When you cancel your Amazon Prime membership, any free ebooks you downloaded through Prime Reading disappear just like they would with a service like Netflix for books. However, any free ebooks that you downloaded through Kindle First Reads (the free ebook of the month for Prime members) that you downloaded will remain yours to keep and download forever.

I may use Prime Reading for a short time to read a book, but it’s really not worth the risk of losing a book. I’ve instead built a fairly solid library of books by focusing on First Reads and purchasing discounted books during Prime Day. This way I know that even when my membership lapses, I still have all of my books.

alejandra ag · Answer

From a pure logical perspective, Amazon is correct in removing the free reading benefit for Prime members as Prime is a service that users pay for on an annual or monthly basis for benefits such as free shipping, Prime Videos, Prime Music and more. The fact that users are getting confused and assuming that they are buying ebooks when they click on a ‘free’ button to access them to read is because users have become so accustomed to purchasing ebooks and therefore associating ‘free’ with ‘buy’. Amazon’s interface does not always clearly differentiate between the benefits that members have access to as part of their subscription and those that they can purchase separately. However, when one reads the terms of service for Prime members, it is clear that the benefit of reading is meant to be a benefit to help retain subscribers to all of the services listed, and not a means to build a permanent library that members can keep after cancellation of their membership, which would go against the Amazon business model for the service. I wish that they would be more clear in their intentions at the ‘borrowing’ point of Prime services.

Emily Kimball · Answer

Sometimes the book is offered for free in a special marketing promotion – like a “free download” for a weekend. That would be a purchase. The same book will be offered in the Prime Reading catalog a month later. That would be a loan. (The exact same file – a book – offered by two different paths with two completely different long-term outcomes for you the reader). So, you can’t just look at the title of a book and assume that it will be a purchase or a loan. You have to look at the specific transaction that brought the book to your library. The path that you took to get the book is what determines its permanence. So, always remember the path that you took to get a book. Was it a “Claim your book” button on the First Reads page? That’s a purchase path. Was it a “Read for Free” button on the book’s main product page? That’s a loan path. Context is everything.

Sara Peñafiel · Answer

A “pro tip” for the overly-paranoid reader (like myself): Take advantage of the ‘Send to Kindle’ option with Prime Reading titles. Yes, you can email a Prime Reading borrowed book to your own Kindle address. In theory, this creates a separately stored “document” version of the title which wouldn’t affect your borrowed license copy. But, will this document still be readable after Prime Reading has been cancelled? Since the underlying file most likely contains DRM, it’s unlikely to work but I can report an anecdata here: users report that documents sent to their Kindle addresses via ‘Send to Kindle’ appear to be still there after the borrowed license has expired. But, to reiterate, this is likely a grey area and could be against the Amazon TOS for the borrows. So, safest assumption: files associated with Prime Reading are goes after the loan period has expired.

Doreen Samuda · Answer

My borrowed books through Prime Reading expire too. Once your Prime membership has expired, all the books you borrowed through Prime Reading will automatically return to their original state as if you had never borrowed them in the first place. I remember a few years ago I had a whole list of books I had marked as “Read” through Prime Reading. The books were fine but I had to go through a very tight financial time and had to pause my Prime membership. When I rejoined a few months later half of my digital books had been “raided” from my Kindle bookshelf. The covers for the borrowed books were there but the books themselves were not available to read. Even though it made sense for Amazon to do this as a business, as a reader it was very disappointing. Now I treat Prime Reading like a streaming service for books and I only download books that I am pretty sure I am going to read before my membership expires. Occasionally I will use it to read the first book in a series and then buy the rest of the books in the series one by one.

So while the books are great to read while you have Prime, they are not stored in your Kindle library for future reading. They are really a streaming service for books.

p_ordanza · Answer

Samples do not expire! I can download a sample of any book (Prime or not) and it will remain on my Kindle forever. So for books in Prime Reading, I can download a sample and see if I like it before buying the full book to borrow. Even after my Prime subscription has expired, I will still have the sample on my Kindle to remind me of the book and possibly purchase it later. Samples are the true permanent freebies of Kindle books. They are wonderful discovery tools, leaving a permanent artifact in my library, independent of my subscription status. Right now, I have a huge collection of samples of books that I am interested in reading but haven’t gotten to yet. They make up my “maybe later” list of books.

Debbi Acuña · Answer

I just wanted to add my gratitude for my public library’s digitization of their book collection using the service Libby. The books do expire, but for no additional charge, and it’s crystal clear that what I’m getting is a loan of something that the library owns, as opposed to something that I’d purchase and own myself. This is a purely library model. As opposed to Amazon’s Prime Reading, which attempts to provide a library-like experience on top of a store, the biggest confusion with this service is that it’s bundled with the rest of the content that I’ve purchased, and sit next to my owned books. In order to avoid this confusion, I use each service for what it’s truly best at: Libby for borrowing books to read, Amazon for buying individual books and learning about new authors and series, and Prime Reading for those “impulse reads” that I don’t have any attachment to after finishing.

Zoya_Dmitrovka · Answer

I see so many people confuse the different ways to get free books on Amazon. I’ll go through the main ones. First, there’s Prime Reading. Prime members can choose from a selection of free books to read one at a time. These are borrowed, just like from a library, and when you cancel Prime your borrowed books will be automatically returned, you’ll no longer be able to access them. Next, Kindle First Reads (also known as First Reads). For each month, Prime members can choose one or two of the pre-release books to keep permanently to add to their library for $0.00. These are actually purchases, so even though you paid nothing for them they are yours to keep even after you cancel your Prime membership. And then there’s Kindle Unlimited. This is another separate subscription service for Amazon, similar to how Netflix supplies hours of movies and TV for a monthly subscription fee, Kindle Unlimited supplies thousands of books for a monthly fee. Just as with Netflix, if you cancel the service you’ll no longer have access to the books supplied under that service. To check if you own a free book, look at your ‘Content & Devices’ page, on Amazon. The ‘Purchase Date’ column will list the date you purchased a book if you’ve purchased it, and the price will be $0.00. On the other hand, books supplied via ‘Prime Reading’ will say that in the ‘Purchase Date’ column, or there will be an ‘Expiration Date’ listed for borrowed books.

I recommend checking the terms (usually on the book’s detail page) before you click ‘Read for Free’ to ensure that it is a borrow or a purchase.

Do Free Ebooks With Amazon Prime Expire After Cancellation?

11 Answers

Kaugnay na Mga Aklat

The Billionaire’s Last Clause

Divorcing The Billionaire On Valentine's Day

Rejecting the Prince's Mate

Rejected By My Alpha, Claimed By The Ruthless Billionaire

Claimed by the Alpha After Divorce

Countdown To My Alpha's Goodbye

Paksa

Kaugnay na Mga Tanong

How often does amazon prime update ebooks free with prime?

Are Kindle library books returned when you cancel Prime?

How often are new free ebooks added to amazon prime?

Can I still access books after canceling amazon kindle unlimited subscription?

Can I get free books for the Amazon Kindle without Prime?

How often does Amazon update its free prime reading books?

How to access free ebooks at Amazon without a subscription?

Do you have to pay for books on Kindle if you have Amazon Prime?

How to get notifications for free books on kindle amazon prime deals?

How many amazon kindle books prime can I read per month?