Rupa Publications, one of India's major book publishing houses, has signed up with Amazon for Kindle Unlimited. According to Amazon, over 680 titles, including works from authors such as Chetan Bhagat, Khushwant Singh, Ruskin Bond, Mark Tully and APJ Abdul Kalam, will be available on Kindle Unlimited. Amazon is also extending the subscription first month subscription for Kindle Unlimited of Rs 99 till October 31st 2015. Kindle Unlimited offers readers a million titles to choose from, at a subscription fees of Rs 999 for six months, and Rs 1799 per year, and works across phones, tablets and computers with the Kindle app, apart from the Kindle device. Once the membership is canceled, the books are removed from the users accounts. The company says that the response to Kindle Unlimited has been "enthusiastic", though we doubt they'll give us data for quantifying subscriber enthusiasm. Amazon is usually miserly with numbers. This launch of Kindle Unlimited, and signing Rupa Publications (which is, in a sense, akin to T-Series in the music space) will only increase Amazon's dominance in the ebooks market, especially at a time when Flipkart has exited ebooks ( or rather, "evaluating" its eBooks strategy). That leaves DailyHunt and Infibeam as key independent distributors of ebooks, apart from platforms such as Google (with Google Play Books) and Apple Books. Lets also not forget that Amazon intends to launch a Kindle with support for Indic languages around the end of the year. How soon before such consolidation with large platforms happens in the music…
