Kindle Unlimited Becomes Kindle+, but Canadians Aren’t Getting It All

Amazon has renamed Kindle Unlimited to Kindle+, and the subscription now includes audiobooks at no extra cost. The audiobook part only works in the U.S. for now, according to an announcement Amazon posted for authors on October 21, making it the latest new Kindle perk that skips Canada at launch.

The new name is already live on Amazon’s Canadian site, where the signup page now reads “Kindle Unlimited is now Kindle+.” Beyond the branding, the service works the same way here. Subscribers get unlimited reading from a catalogue of millions of eBooks, comics and magazines, can keep up to 20 titles at once with no due dates, and don’t need Amazon Prime to sign up.

Pricing in Canada stays at $11.99 per month, which Amazon still lists on its Canadian FAQ alongside a 30-day free trial. That’s the rate Kindle Unlimited moved to in 2025, when it jumped from $9.99. Americans pay the same $11.99, just in U.S. dollars and now with audiobooks included, so Canadians are effectively paying more for less.

In the U.S., a Kindle+ subscription now includes audiobooks narrated by Amazon’s AI “virtual voice” tech, along with human-narrated titles made through Audible’s ACX marketplace. Subscribers can read, listen or switch between the two. Amazon says audiobooks in Kindle+ are coming to “more marketplaces,” but it hasn’t named Canada or shared a timeline. Until then, Canadian listeners still need something like Audible, which rolled out a cheaper Standard plan here in March.

For authors, the changes go further. Audiobooks with virtual voice are now automatically included in Kindle+ (and Audible Plus) whenever the matching eBook is enrolled in KDP Select, and the only way to keep one out is to unpublish the audiobook. ACX titles can be enrolled separately from the KDP Bookshelf if they’re exclusive to Audible, use the Pay for Production model and have Whispersync for Voice turned on.

Listening is paid by the page from the KDP Select Global Fund, the same way reading is, and Amazon says it’s adding money to the fund to cover it so eBook payouts aren’t diluted. Authors are paid the first time a subscriber reads or listens to a given page, and when someone reads and listens at the same time, they earn whichever rate is higher. Canadian authors can enrol their audiobooks too, but those titles will only reach U.S. listeners for now.

Amazon says the rename reflects a catalogue that has grown well past eBooks, and it wanted a name that “works across every marketplace.” The audiobook push also fits with its other AI reading tools, like the AI-powered Kindle Translate feature it launched last year.

Would audiobooks get you to sign up for Kindle+ in Canada, or is $11.99 already too much?