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The Kindle Store is an online e-book e-commerce store operated by Amazon.com as part of its retail website and can be accessed from any Amazon Kindle, Fire tablet or Kindle mobile app. At the launch of the Kindle in November 2007, the store had more than 88,000 digital titles available. This number increased to more than 275,000 by late 2008, and exceeded 765,000 by August 2011. In July 2014, there were over 2.7 million titles available at the US store and as of January 2017 there were over 5 million e-books available in the US. Content from the store is purchased online and downloaded using either Wi-Fi or Amazon's 3G Whispernet to the user's device.
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E-book prices
In late 2007, new releases and New York Times best sellers were being offered for approximately $11 at the store, with first chapters of many books offered as free samples. Many titles, including some classics, are offered free of charge or at a low price, which has been stated to relate to the cost of adapting the book to the Kindle format. Magazines, newspapers and blogs via RSS are provided for a monthly subscription fee or during a free trial period. Newspaper subscriptions cost from $1.99 to $27.99 per month; magazines charge between $1.25 and $10.99 per month, and blogs charge from $0.99 to $1.99 per month. Amazon e-book sales overtook print for one day for the first time on Christmas Day 2009. International users may pay different prices for e-books depending on the country listed as their home address.
Lending Library
As a member of Amazon Prime, access to the "Kindle Owners' Lending Library" is a perk that allows Kindle-owning members to borrow one e-book, choosing from over 600,000 titles as of July 2014, per calendar month from the Kindle Store.
Kindle Unlimited
In July 2014, Amazon added the Kindle Unlimited subscription service to the store that at release allowed unlimited access to over 638,000 titles and over 7,000 audiobooks for a $9.99 monthly fee. As of June 2015, there were over one million titles available in Kindle Unlimited, from publishers such as Algonquin Books, Allworth Press, Basic Books, Chronicle Books, Greenleaf Book Group, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, HOW Books, Indiana University Press, Lerner Publishing Group, Lonely Planet, Mariner Books, North Light Books, Rodale, Inc., Skyhorse Publishing, Storey Publishing, Timber Press and Workman Publishing Company. As of February 2016, the US version of Kindle Unlimited includes over 1.2 million titles that includes over 200,000 foreign language titles. Amazon pays authors using Kindle Unlimited using a per page rate and during 2016 nearly $200 million was paid to authors.
Whispersync
Whispersync is a service provided for e-books acquired from the Kindle Store that allows customers to synchronize reading progress, bookmarks, and other information across Kindle devices and Kindle apps. The service debuted with the Kindle 2's release in February 2009.
File formats
The Kindle Store offer e-books in Amazon's proprietary e-book formats: AZW, and, for fourth generation and later Kindles, AZW3, also called KF8. In August 2015, "Kindle Format 10" (KFX) file format was added to the Store that has enhanced typography. E-books available in KFX are indicated on the e-book's description page.
The Kindle Store's terms of use forbid transferring Amazon format e-books to another user or a different type of device. However, Amazon allows limited lending of certain e-books.