Amazon is offering one of its best Prime Day deals for bookworms: For a limited time, you can get three months of Kindle Unlimited for free if you’re an eligible Prime member. It’s a time-limited offer related to the shopping season, and extends vastly beyond e-readers — essentially getting you access to an enormous digital library on Kindles, phones, tablets and the web.
The headline value is straightforward. In the U.S., Kindle Unlimited typically costs $11.99 a month, so three months free represents something like a $36 savings. After the promotional period, your membership will continue and be billed monthly at the then regular rate (currently $11.99) plus tax until canceled. The catch, as with previous offer cycles, is eligibility: It’s typically limited to new Kindle Unlimited subscribers on Prime accounts that haven’t taken advantage of a similar promotion in the past.
How the three-month Kindle Unlimited deal works for Prime members
First, log in to the Prime account that you want to use. Visit the Kindle Unlimited landing page, or open the Kindle app and navigate to it (you’ll need to be signed into your Amazon account first). If your account is eligible, you’ll see a banner or offer box that says “3 months free” for Kindle Unlimited.
Click Join Kindle Unlimited and make sure it says $0.00 (your first 3 months are included in the offer). Select a payment method for renewing the subscription, complete enrollment, and you’re all set. You can begin borrowing titles as soon as you sign up, and membership works across Kindle devices, Fire tablets, iOS and Android devices, and the browser-based Kindle Cloud Reader.
If you don’t see the offer, try logging out and back in, opening it on desktop or mobile, or ensure that you’re on your main country storefront. Promos are regional and YMMV.
Eligibility And Fine Print You Should Know
Most deals like this are restricted to new Kindle Unlimited customers who have active Prime accounts and also have not participated in a free trial of the service. The deal is limited to one offer per account, and can’t be used in conjunction with other Kindle Unlimited promotions. After the free trial period, the plan will automatically renew at $14.99/month unless you cancel before the free trial period ends (cancel in Memberships & Subscriptions; term is subject to change).
If you’re buying a Kindle as a gift or setting up another family member, keep in mind that the promotion is applied to an individual Prime account. They can be shared with family members on a single account, but not between two different Amazon accounts.
What you get with Kindle Unlimited during the trial period
Kindle Unlimited offers access to a rotating selection of more than two million ebooks, as well as comics, magazines and thousands of titles that include Audible narration. You can download books for offline reading, listen with the perfect companion in your downtime, and read across devices, automatically transferring your bookmarks to make sure you pick up right where you left off. Whispersync technology saves and synchronizes your last page read, so you can go between devices without ever losing your place. You can borrow up to 20 items at once with no due dates or late fees.
For heavy readers, the math can sound persuasive. Pew Research Center has found that Americans read an average of 12 books per year, but with heavy readers pulling the mean higher. If you normally buy two or more ebooks monthly, your subscription can easily pay for itself at its usual rates — making a 3-month free window an easy way to see if the catalog of available books aligns with your taste.
The library ranges from bestsellers to indie hits, genre fiction and backlist titles that can be elusive elsewhere. It’s also a discovery engine: the Kindle app’s recommendations surface authors and series that align with what you’ve read before, and Amazon’s broader ecosystem (and a Goodreads integration) can help keep track of progress and queue up your next book.
How to get the most out of your free Kindle Unlimited months
Remind yourself to actually go in and review your subscription a few days ahead of the renewal date, so you can choose whether or not to continue. Create a short reading list in the Kindle app, download books for offline reading on trips, and then just give them away or lend them to friends when you’re done — with a mix of format types (novels, collections of short stories and audiobooks with accompanying narration) to see what you actually use.
If you’re buying a new Kindle during Prime Day, combine the device setup with the trial activation so that your library is synced automatically.
Regarding shared households, you can sign in to the same account on multiple devices in order to have borrowed titles accessible on all devices.
How To Cancel Before Your Subscription Is Renewed
Navigate to Account & Lists, click on Memberships & Subscriptions, scroll down to locate Kindle Unlimited and select Manage Membership. You will find the renewal date and the Cancel option. Cancellation applies at the end of the free period, and you will not be charged for the trial.
Bottom line: If you’re a Prime member who hasn’t yet tested out Kindle Unlimited, this is probably the most generous version of this offer that we’ll see before another major sales event. It’s a completely risk-free runway to determine if the subscription’s catalog of books and features fits within your reading routine.