The publication you are currently reading is now also an Amazon.com product. This means that for $1.99 a month you can read it on your Kindle in black & white.
Of course, for the price of an Internet connection you can read it for free in colour. Of that $1.99/month, I get 30% or 59.7¢, and I bet they don’t round up to the nearest penny either. So I doubt it’ll buy me a yacht any time soon.
The sign-up process couldn’t be easier. Apparently all you need is the URI of an Atom feed. There is an approval process, which I hope includes some sort of ownership sanity-checking, otherwise you could go publish lots of other peoples’ blogs on Kindle.
I’ll report back if anything interesting happens.
[Update, June 22nd.] After a couple of tries, I got the Kindle publishers’ site to generate a preview for me of what their version of this looks like. Small pages, large type, adequate typography except for b0rked line breaks in HTML list constructs. All pictures are silently omitted. Here’s a screen-grab from the preview.
It’s not terrible.
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Comment feed for ongoing:
From: dave (Jun 17 2009, at 14:21)
I can't believe Amazon had the balls to propose that kind of rate structure. That they would take 70% just to do digital delivery of pre-existing content.
Who do they think they are, a wireless carrier?
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From: Jarek Piórkowski (Jun 17 2009, at 14:47)
Well, they have to recoup the "free" Whispernet somehow.
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From: Dustin Quasar (Jun 17 2009, at 17:18)
70% for Amazon seems pretty ridiculous. That's the kind of rate that evil game publishers take.
For comparison: you can put a product on the iphone app store and apple will take 30%, giving you 70%. And you get to set the price to be whatever you want.
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From: Greg Pfister (Jun 17 2009, at 20:11)
Evil compared with what? Standard royalty rate for dead tree publishing is 15% -- so the publisher keeps 85%.
Of course, they do have to process all those dead trees, which Amazon doesn't.
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From: Andrew (Jun 18 2009, at 02:03)
Apparently the approval process doesn't (or didn't) include ownership sanity checking. http://blogmum.com/2009/05/how-to-publish-your-blog-on-the-kindle-and-why-you-should-do-it-asap/
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From: Daniel (Jun 18 2009, at 12:52)
Well, what about delivering the "pdf" for free and asking for free donations? Perhaps you could make more money. I see a Kindle as a very dangerous trap. It creates libraries with validity date and technically "destroys" any possibility of "fair use".
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From: Rafa (Jun 19 2009, at 08:13)
Always is dificult to build a business model to make money from the net. Something has to be cashed, but is easy to loose leadership and audience.
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From: Derek K. Miller (Jun 23 2009, at 08:07)
Since we don't have the Kindle here, I can't check, but I was under the impression that it has a web browser built in. Presumably you could read any blog with that, so would someone pay $2 a month to read it a different way on the same device?
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From: stand (Jun 23 2009, at 14:59)
Derek,
The web browser on the Kindle is listed as "Experimental." It is...sub-optimal.
Having said that however, I was considering putting a simple feed reading app up on my web server that would probably do everything I wanted.
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