Kindle Unlimited Is Now Kindle+

Your Kindle Unlimited subscription has a new name and a pile of audiobooks in it, for the same $11.99 a month you were already paying. That part is a real upgrade. It is also a catalog where some of the narrators don't exist.

Amazon flipped the switch on October 22. Kindle Unlimited is Kindle+ now, the price and the features carry over, your reading history and bookmarks and notes come with you, and you can still borrow 20 titles at a time with no due dates. The Canadian signup page says it flatly: "Kindle Unlimited is now Kindle+." Amazon's reason for the rename is that the catalog has grown past ebooks and it wanted a name that, in its words, "works across every marketplace."

What's new

Thousands more audiobooks. That is the figure Amazon gave, and it is the only figure Amazon gave. What's included now is millions of ebooks plus audiobooks, comics, manga and magazines, with a 30-day trial for new subscribers and no Prime membership required.

Amazon wants you reading and listening to the same book. Read on the Kindle, put it down, and keep going in your ears while you do the dishes. Amazon has chased that handoff for years, and dropping it into a subscription you already pay for is an easier sell than asking you to add an Audible plan on top.

Who is reading these books

Two kinds of audiobooks landed in Kindle+. Human-narrated titles from ACX, Amazon's audiobook production marketplace, can now be pulled in through KDP Select. And audiobooks made with Virtual Voice, Amazon's text-to-speech narration tool for self-published authors, go in automatically. In an email to authors quoted by The eBook Reader, Amazon says audiobooks with virtual voice "are automatically included in Kindle+ (and the Audible Plus catalog)," that an enrolled author's audiobook is "now available to Kindle+ listeners," and that "no action is required from you." Where a book has no human-narrated version, Amazon says it can generate one with a virtual voice and shelve it next to the ebook.

Automatic inclusion with nothing required of the author is how a catalog gets big in a hurry, and it leaves open what the mix actually is. Amazon has not published a split between virtual voice and human narration, and I haven't found an outlet with a count either. The eBook Reader's headline frames it as AI audiobooks taking over, but the post doesn't tally titles, and its sharpest line on the result is a judgment rather than a measurement: it "sounds like it's not all that different from using text-to-speech." So the share is unknown, which is not the same as small.

Canada gets the name, not the audiobooks

The audiobooks are US-only for now. Canadian subscribers get the new branding and the same ebooks, comics and magazines they had last week, at $11.99 a month in Canadian dollars, which iPhone in Canada notes is up from the $9.99 it cost before a 2025 increase. Amazon says audiobooks are headed to more marketplaces and has named neither Canada nor a date. If you want the listening half of this from north of the border, you still need something like Audible.

The rename itself is also still halfway done. The eBook Reader found a Kindle product page offering "With 3 months of Kindle Unlimited" and "With 3 months of Kindle+" as separate choices on the same screen.

Before you hit play

If you read mostly ebooks and consider audio a bonus, this is free stuff attached to a bill you already pay, and you should go dig through it. If you care about narration, and for a lot of listeners the narrator is the whole experience, then "more audiobooks" and "more AI-narrated audiobooks" are two different products, and only one of them is what you signed up for.

Check the narrator credit on the listing before you hand a book six hours of your week. Amazon has told its authors that the virtual voice titles go in automatically. It hasn't told subscribers how much of the shelf that is.