Amazon Prime members finally get some real book benefits

For just under $100 a year, Amazon Prime is a pretty good deal: free 2-day shipping, all the streaming music and video content you can consume and cloud storage for all of your photos. What's been missing, oddly, is any kind of significant book deal — until now.

On Wednesday, the online retail giant added Amazon Prime Reading to the list of benefits offered with Prime. Yes, books, the thing that helped build the Amazon business, is the last benefit to be added to Prime.

Now, included in your monthly payment of $10.99 (or discounted $99 a year payment), members get free access to the digital version of roughly 1,000 books and popular magazines. Physical copies will still cost you. A brief perusal of the offerings turns up, naturally, no current best-sellers. Read more...