Kindle Unlimited, Now With Limits

Kindle Unlimited, Now With Limits Kindle (platform)

I was browsing MobileRead this morning when I read that earlier this week a Kindle Unlimited user in Australia has had their KU subscription suspended until the end of the month:

Has anybody else been locked out?

I received an email from "M" at telling me:
"I have checked the details and I see that you have reached maximum number of books you can borrow per month. You will be able to borrow books in a few days once the borrow books goes below the limit in last 30 days.

To learn more about the terms and conditions please visit the link below :"

I can't find any mention of maximums or monthly limits.

I can still purchase fine, just not download KU.

It's hardly "unlimited" if there's a limit! Especially since there's a limited no of titles to begin with!

I am still trying to figure out what Amazon thinks it's doing here, but it would appear that Amazon is now imposing limits on the number of ebooks you can borrow in Kindle Unlimited.

I could not find out what those limits are, however, and in fact Amazon didn't even tell this user they were approaching the limit or had reached it. Instead, Amazon just locked the user out of their KU subscription.

"I'd have to go back and check for an exact number but I'd agree, probably more than enough to flag my account for April but no excuse for not contacting me to check that my account hadn't been hacked, if they really were worried. Instead, they just lock the account without notice - even though they can phone you in seconds if you request it under Support," the user wrote over on MobileRead. "They pulled the plug without warning or subsequent contact, I had to make numerous Support tickets before "M" finally told me what was going on ... and I'm still waiting to be told what the undisclosed limit really is now, 'so I can follow the rules'."

Have you ever seen this before?

Nate Hoffelder

View posts by Nate Hoffelder


  1. Darryl10 May, 2019

    I’d suggest anyone interested look at the actual Mobileread thread. The OP of that thread has so far not revealed the number of books borrowed on KU in a month, despite numerous requests. It seems, however, that they numbered in the hundreds. It also seems that the OP was not reading these books but borrowing them, doing some sort of search of the contents and then returning them to borrow more. Why has also not been revealed in any reasonable detail. It seems the OP’s behaviour was indistinguishable from that of some scammers to Amazon’s algorithms, and I’m still not clear on what the OP was actually doing and why. In an ideal world Amazon would of course make contact with people detected by their algorithms and give them a chance to respond. However, given the degree of automation Amazon uses it is naive to expect this. Where Amazon does fall down is in making it extremely difficult for those innocents caught by its algorithms to talk to someone and get it sorted out promptly. On what we know so far I have zero sympathy for this OP.

  2. Ema Segreto10 May, 2019

    Kindle Unlimited authors make their money based on pages read. There are scamming circles that send lists to people to borrow books and flip through them (without actually reading them) to inflate the authors earnings. Amazon is probably watching how many books a person checks out and the amount of time they are spending with them to try and cut down on this practice.


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