Kindle Unlimited is an extended gutter and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their aberrant elf sex harems and gay billionaire vampire polyamorous boyfriends will foam up about their waists and all the authors and publishers and distributors will look up and shout ‘SLOW YOUR ROLL!’
And we’ll look down and whisper ‘No.”
The week before last, after we ran into the KDP limit of 10 ebook releases per week, we followed the instructions to request an increase in our weekly limit from 10 to 15. This seemed reasonable enough, considering that the previous limit was 3 per day, or 21 per week. So, it was with some surprise that we were informed yesterday that KDP had reduced everyone’s limits to 2 per week.
This is why we have not had a daily release since Monday, and why the last two books of Eiji Yoshikawa’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms will not be released until next week to complete the series. And this new KDP limit will have a serious impact on our ability to distribute our planned production schedule through the traditional channels.
It will not, however, have any impact whatsoever on our production schedule or your weekly ebook, although it does tend to stress the importance of backing Castalia Unlimited once it goes live. To put it into perspective, we already have 36 Japanese translations, 17 Spanish translations, 3 German translations, 3 French translations, and 1 Italian translation completed that are not yet available anywhere, and we are adding new translations to the library at a rate of about 3 per day.
Not only that, but the most recent revisions to our translation system are allowing us to realize a level of translation quality that is much higher than that of the average traditional translator, as per the Red Team analyses:
The gains in naturalness and contemporary readability push it closer to the upper end of the scale without any real loss of literary control or fidelity. The prose now feels more alive and less dense in the places that matter most for a 2026 reader, while the longer descriptive and psychological passages retain their precision and weight. It still isn’t quite at the absolute top of the Weaver/Eco range (those tend to have an almost invisible, effortless elegance that never draws attention to the act of translation), but it is very close: polished, intelligent, thematically sharp, and highly readable.
An exceptionally polished translation. It reads naturally as a piece of classic historical fiction while maintaining strict fidelity to Yoshikawa’s distinct narrative cadence.
Very close to 100. Its departures from the German are usually intelligent literary decisions rather than losses of meaning. It reads like a translation that has been written by someone who understands what the German is doing, not merely what it says. The English is exceptionally fluent and readable, and it has a strong literary voice. It is considerably closer to the Weaver end of the scale than to the Bell end.
So the gap between what is available on KDP and what is available from Castalia Unlimited is going to continue to grow. By the end of the year, that gap will be larger than our total collection of books available on KDP.
Castalia Library makes the world’s most beautiful leather books at its own bindery in Switzerland. Castalia House is the world’s premier translator of never-before translated works from Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, and German into English. To support Castalia House’s historic translation efforts and receive a new translated ebook every week, support the Alexandria project, and get future access to Castalia Unlimited, become a paid subscriber to this substack. And to receive a premium deluxe leatherbound history book every four months, subscribe to Castalia History.
We're in!
I wonder if this action is part of a general campaign by Amazon to limit ai generated books of low quality in ku, or another directed attack on Castalia House.