I've had a Kindle for over a year, and I love to read classic novels like works from Shakespeare which are (mostly, I think) available for free on the Kindle Book Store. For books released recently, such as The Fault in Our Stars, there's two options to choose from: i) Buy now ii) Rent with Amazon Prime I usually buy them, instead of borrowing them from Amazon Prime, mainly because I'm not a Prime member and because I'm not sure how it works. Do you think I should consider using the Prime feature that Amazon offers for it's kindle? Or is it just not worth the time & money.
I think it depends on how much you use Amazon itself as to whether you should sign up for Prime. If you only use Amazon to buy e-books, then NO, I don't suggest getting Prime. Prime offers free shipping on almost all products sold by Amazon and if you're not going to take advantage of that main feature, what's the point? Personally, I do use Amazon a lot but I don't have Prime. It's not because I don't want it, because believe me I do. Its because it is an upfront cost of $99. I can't justify spending that much all at once. Now, if they ever offer an option to pay monthly, I would sign up in a heartbeat. For now, I just try to make sure the item I am ordering comes with free shipping or I wait to place an order until I have at least $35 worth of product. Kindle offers many books at discounted rates on a daily and monthly basis. The book you're considering borrowing will probably be cheap enough in a few months if its not already. So its not worth signing up for Prime just for that one feature.
Amazon Prime also has a video and music service. If you like music or are a fan of TV, then it could still be worth it even if you don't do a lot of shopping on Amazon. If you are only doing it for the e-books, then I wouldn't recommend it.
I've tried to use the Amazon Prime Music service, but because not everything is free, I found that a lot of what I wanted to listen to was not available. I figured that this would be similar to the Kindle offering, so I haven't bothered trying. We do love the Amazon Prime Movies though, but we often end up purchasing them anyway, out of fear that a kids movie that our boys love won't be available anymore. All of that and we love the shipping options on Prime...so I like the service, but for some reason, I prefer a service like Scribd for books.
I definitely prefer Scribd for books. For a flat rate every month, I can read as many books as I want. They only have two major publishers right now but there are plenty of books between the two so I don't ever see myself running out of material. I checked into Amazon's Kindle Unlimited service and was totally not impressed. Sure, you get free access to all the self-published authors and how-to books but all the books I have saved on Scribd are not available to Kindle Unlimited. Kindle Unlimited does have Harry Potter and The Hunger Games but I have those in hardback. It definitely isn't worth it. I'll be cancelling when my free trial is up and continuing to use Scribd.
