UPDATE: as Catana points out in the comments, the analysis below is partly premised on a mistaken assumption that I made (and which Amazon is not in any rush to correct in their KDP Select Terms of Use). Namely, I’d assumed that the library consists of unlimited loans. But it doesn’t. It’s one per month. So, most users are likely to use their one “borrow” for books that are more expensive (~$6.50 or higher, to make it worth the $79 annual fee)–NOT books at indie pricing. This means that we’re still where we were before, but many indies (esp. people like me who aren’t in the US, and so are less likely to check the Amazon Prime Lending Library’s terms) won’t realise this, and will opt in under a false assumption. Tsk, Tsk, Amazon. No doubt it was just an oversight. I’ve left the rest of the post intact, because depending on your pricing and your popularity, this analysis might still be relevant in helping to determine whether you will opt in or not. /update
In Homer’s The Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis were fearsome sea monsters who existed in sufficient proximity to each other that any sailors who wished to brave those waters had to sail very carefully indeed, between the two horrors. More contemporary speculations posit Scylla as a rock shoal and Charybdis as a whirlpool.
And at the moment, I find myself to be caught between the two of them. To break it down:
