How Often Does Amazon Prime Update Ebooks Free With Prime?

In all likelihood Amazon runs a daily script that adds newly Prime-licensed books to the pool of books in the catalog and removes books whose Prime licenses have expired. So the catalog is merely the current snapshot of that very large pool of Prime-licensed books. The automated updating is happening all the time. It is very hard for humans to get their minds around the idea of something that is constantly updating when we are by nature more inclined to see discrete events rather than a never-ending flow of updates. Thus, the most accurate description of what is going on here is also the least satisfying: it is always updating.

I only use it for First Reads though. The rest of the books it lists are all ones I would never actually purchase. A graveyard of waste.

I am a heavy user of Kindle since 2015 and I can confirm that the free top 100 list is not updated on a strict schedule, but rather on a continuous basis taking into account the download velocity. As for the pattern of updates, I have observed that large updates typically coincide with the daily deals refresh which is around midnight Pacific Time. What I find really interesting is the way different genres behave on the list. For weeks on end, it will be dominated by the cookbooks and romance novels, and then suddenly the thrillers will shoot up to the top, due to a promotion by a big name author. Classic novels such as ‘Pride and Prejudice’ seem to always hold their place in the list, whereas new releases can shoot up the list temporarily. I usually check the free list in the early morning and in the late evening when the most changes occur. For example, I was able to get “The Martian” by author Andy Weir during a very rare promotion when it was for a short time in the free list and then it disappeared. I find it so much fun checking the list every day looking for treasures.

Kindle Prime Reads’ updates feel like I’m getting a new batch of books every month. Unfortunately, it’s not quite a predictable schedule, but I have kind of worked out the update pattern and generally it’s all new books at the start of the month with occasional extras later in the month. You get a nice selection of new established authors and indie works too. In my last update of the month there was a debut novelist’s work included amongst the usual best seller or two that one would expect to see. The ‘Coming Soon’ banner at the top is updated occasionally with teaser information regarding upcoming Prime Reads as well. Updates aren’t too frequent, therefore not too ‘in your face’ but frequent enough to keep me piled high with TBRs.

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.

You can still get loads of free Kindle books even if you don't have a Prime membership. Many of these will be listed in the ‘Top 100 Free’ section of the Kindle Store, but there are also many free books promoted by individual authors. You can also find many free books on certain platforms, where you can download them in exchange for leaving a honest review. Recently I downloaded ‘SINFUL PLEASURES: Short Filthy Stories’ to my Kindle for example – it’s a collection of very short, but very filthy, stories that can be read in a few minutes and are perfect for popping on your Kindle to read on your daily commute or while you’re taking a break from work.

One thing I have found necessary to keep track of free Kindle books is a mix of different strategies as Amazon does not always promote their free Kindle books. The first thing I recommend is to sign up to use CamelCamelCamel to send you price drop emails for Kindle books. You can then choose to receive an email when the price drops to zero. The Fussy Librarian also provides tailored book recommendations based on your particular writing genres, and often e-mails news of free books and discounted books too. Searching international Amazon stores (such as Amazon UK or DE) for free eBooks that may not be listed on your local version of Amazon. Note that you can change the Amazon store that you are viewing by changing the country/region that you are viewing as within your Amazon account. Prime members can also access the ‘Kindle Owners’ Lending Library’ where you can download and read tons of eBooks for free if you have a Kindle device – a little known but great added benefit of Kindle ownership.

It’s all really confusing – Prime, Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, Prime Reading – lots of things to choose from and I just get confused. I don’t really know what the difference is, but when I search for a book I click on it and it tells me whether I can read it for free as part of Prime or not. If it doesn’t say ‘Read for Free with Prime’ or something along those lines then I know I’ll have to pay for it to read it. But I don’t know the limits of Prime and what’s included and what’s not – I just search for what I want to read and it tells me whether it’s free or not.

I’ve given up on trying to figure out the Amazon freebies and go straight to library apps. The interface for Libby is much cleaner and it really is free to borrow books and not cost me a thing. And I avoid clicking on the ‘buy now’ one-click buttons that surround every free book listing on Amazon. My wallet and my TBR pile thank me.

For those curious about the ten-title limit on lends, it's worth noting that we track a "cart" of the ten titles you've currently got checked out, but that's more akin to a virtual bookshelf that holds 10 books at any given time (which you can then immediately return, of course, to make room for another book to add). Many of our users read very fast (20+ books in a given month), which I suppose is the biggest constraint here, but that's all located in the catalog we've chosen to offer (which is NOT the entire Kindle store). A given catalog will have maybe a few thousand titles, which we periodically refresh, so your "monthly haul" of titles to read is essentially determined by which of those curated choices you actually want to read – if you're a big fan of romance or thriller titles, for example, you could easily have a long list, while if you're reading lots of more obscure non-fiction titles, your choices might be rather constrained. In theory, all books are available to you to lend unlimitedy, but in practice, that's determined by your personal tastes and the size of the catalog we've chosen for your use.