Back in 2009, Amazon created the Amazon Kindle Publishing for Blogs platform and it has been in Beta ever since. This sounds like a great idea…until you realize how it works. It’s not all butterflies and roses.

Updated daily

If you are subscribed to a blog through Amazon, the content is updated daily.

Kindle Blogs are auto-delivered wirelessly to your Kindle and updated throughout the day so you can stay current.

-Amazon

While a constant stream of content sounds great, it could become a major nuisance. According to a review of The New York Time – Latest News, “coolreviewer1″ states the following:

It pumps news stories to the Kindle every 3-4 hours

- coolreviewer1

If you’re subscribed to, say three, blogs that publish multiple posts throughout a day, your Kindle could be swamped with upwards of 24 individual e-documents. That’s a ton of material to manage every day.

The blogs aren’t free

Yup, the blogs you read for free online cost to be delivered to your device. Even if the blog owners wanted to give their content away for free, they couldn’t. Amazon determines the price of each blog. Monthly prices for blogs range between $0.99 and $1.99 per month. Even if the unwieldily content problem was fixed, that costs would add up quick, especially for content you can read for free online.

There’s a reason it’s in beta

Initially, this program sounds like a great idea, and it is, just implemented very poorly. Amazon just hasn’t gotten it right yet and i’m not sure if they ever will. I’ve said it before and  i’ll say it again, Amazon makes their profit on the content they provide, not their eReader hardware. The Kindle Publishing for Blogs is a perfect example.

Now i understand blog owners should be compensated for their content, and they are. Blog owners earn 30% of the subscription price but no blog owner is going to get rich from this.

On the other hand, blog owners should be able to set the price for their monthly subscription. They should be able to give their content away for free. At the very least, have Amazon only charge for the delivery of the content. Amazon’s Simple Email Service(SES) for developers only charges $0.12 per gigabyte of attached email data. What does that have to do with anything? As you may know, each Kindle device has its own Send-to-Kindle email address. You can attach documents to emails and send them to your device with your Send-to-Kindle email address. The new Paperwhites has 1.25 gigabytes of memory available for storing content. Amazon estimates the Paperwhite can store ~1,100 ebooks. In theory, through email delivery using Amazon’s SES service you could fill your new Paperwhite by spending roughly $0.15 on delivering 1.25 gigabytes of content.  If $0.99 per one blog per month didn’t sound ludicrous before, it should now.

A better solution

Obviously getting blogs to your reading device through Amazon is less than ideal. There is hope though! SindleApp allows you to create magazines and add your hand picked website and blogs to it. You schedule how often you want the magazine delivered to you and SindleApp will package the new posts up into a Kindle formatted magazine and deliver it straight to your device. SindleApp eliminates the cumbersome-ness of the new content and the price tag. Create a free account and get up to six blogs in a single magazine delivered to you regularly.