In sad news for readers and writers of the serial format, Amazon is closing its Kindle Vella platform.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
Here are the key facts you need to know:
- Kindle Vella will close in February 2025, though no specific date has been announced yet.
- The last date for uploading new episodes to your stories is December 4 of this year. This is also the final date for purchasing tokens.
- Readers will get to keep any episodes they have unlocked prior to the closure on their local device. That will at least give an incentive to keep reading and downloading more to make the most of existing tokens.
End of the Vellys Award
This also means there will be no more Vellys, the $62,000 prize awarded for the best serial works. The last edition of the awards closed this August.
Thank you to Nate Hoffelder for the tip-off through his Monday morning coffee newsletter.
Decline in Youth Reading for Pleasure
In the latest installment of “woe for the youth of today,” a new iteration of an ongoing survey has found that young people are reading less for pleasure than they used to. The UK’s National Literacy Trust runs an annual survey on reading among five- to eighteen-year-olds, and it has reported a downward trend. Only just over a third (34.6 percent) of those under eighteen report that they enjoy reading for pleasure. This is down over eight percent since last year and marks the lowest point in the nineteen years of the survey.
When it comes to those who read daily, the figure falls to one-fifth (20.5 percent), also down eight percent from last year.
There is, of course, much hand-wringing over these statistics. I would caution that the figures should be taken as part of a wider picture, which also includes increased book sales for this age group and the ongoing popularity of physical books among young readers.
