Amazon Puts Any Blog on the Kindle, for a Price

Amazon Wednesday introduced Kindle Publishing for Blogs Beta, a new program that lets anyone sell blog subscriptions to Kindle users through Amazon's Kindle store. All you have to do is sign up for a blog vendor account (your Amazon customer account will not work), point Amazon to your blog's RSS feed, and fill out some basic information about your publication. After that, Amazon takes care of the rest, including formatting, and your blog should be in the Kindle Store within 12-48 hours.

When I say Amazon takes care of the rest I mean it, as Amazon reserves the right to set subscription pricing for your blog. Amazon says they will set pricing based on what they believe to be "fair value" for your content. Most blog subscriptions in the Amazon store cost between $0.99 and $1.99. However, that pricing is for big name blogs with large readerships like The Huffington Post, Daily Kos and The New York Times. When smaller blogs join the program, there's no telling if the price could go lower. If you would like to give away a blog subscription for free, you're out of luck, as all Kindle-ready blogs are sold for a price. Amazon also prohibits blog publishers from distributing advertising or social networking links like digg, reddit, and Facebook badges with their RSS feed.

As far as the business arrangement goes, Amazon says it will take 70 percent of all subscription sales and deliver 30 percent of the revenue to the blog publisher. That seems like an awfully small margin going to the creator, especially when you consider that smart phone application developers entering into similar relationships with companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft get the majority of the revenue with a small portion going to the distributor.

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