In a development that will surprise absolutely no one who has glanced at a streaming app lately, Amazon has renamed Kindle Unlimited to Kindle Plus. The subscription service, which costs $11.99 per month, will continue to offer unlimited access to a select collection of ebooks, comics, and magazines from the Kindle catalog. The plus-ification of subscription services marches on, unabated, with Amazon the latest company to slap a "Plus" on something that was doing just fine with its original name.

The rebrand comes with an expansion: thousands of titles will still include companion audiobooks, letting you switch between reading and listening exactly where you left off. But Kindle Plus will also include "virtual voice" audiobooks read by AI narrators, according to ZDNet. Because why hire a human to read when a robot can do it with all the emotional range of a GPS?

"The subscription continues to offer the same great reading experience with access to millions of titles, now with the addition of thousands of audiobooks in the U.S. catalog at no extra cost," Amazon spokesperson Josh Pflug told The Verge in an emailed statement. That's corporate for "we changed the name and added robots, please clap."

Kindle Plus remains a standalone subscription separate from Amazon Prime, and users are still limited to borrowing up to 20 titles at once, but with no return dates. Amazon is now also allowing authors using its Kindle Direct Publishing platform to make their audiobooks available to Kindle Plus subscribers. Virtual voice audiobooks will automatically be available as new titles are enrolled in KDP Select, but authors can opt in to AI narrators for previously published titles, too.

For authors who prefer a human narrator - a quaint notion in 2025 - audiobooks created using Audible's Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) marketplace will now also be available through Kindle Plus, starting with subscribers in the US. Amazon plans to expand availability to other markets over time. So, to recap: same price, new name, and AI is now reading you to sleep. Progress!