The Amazon Kindle (affiliate) e-book reader has been on my gadget radar for a little while. I thought the price was too much when it came out and didn’t pull the trigger when I was in heavy gadget buying mode, but they’ve since upgraded and made a bigger screen and added a few more goodies. The new Kindle DX is still black and white and still a bit too pricey I think at $489 but being I love to read and am on the move, this device remains on the radar as a possibility.

One of the neat things about the Kindle is it has forever free wireless access to the Kindle store so anywhere you went that there was coverage, you could buy and read a book. Or even a blog. I submitted this blog eons ago but it never got added. You can probably guess the blogs you would find on the Kindle when Amazon chose them.

Well this changed this week when Amazon shared their new Kindle Publishing for Blogs area – open to all bloggers - which means the blog population in the Kindle Store could increase dramatically in the coming days, weeks and months.

Or maybe not, as it’s not like there are a zillion blog hungry Kindle store shoppers.

And unfortunately there is no option to choose what price to charge for the blog as Amazon sets that which is kind of a bummer because I would have chosen the absolute least price (likely free if it was available – which it isn’t - in fact). I marked down the Hmm updates to ‘1-2 updates a week’ for now since that’s pretty accurate as of late, but I suspect this frequency will be increased in the coming months as my stored up writing energy is starting to overflow.

Most blogs cost $1.99/month to subscribe to and the blog owner only gets 30%, so I won’t be retiring off Kindle blog subscription income any time soon.

If only blog publishers could add bonus content

Really wish there was a way I could push additional bonus content a la DVD extras out to these Kindle subscribers as I still have a significant backlog of unpublished posts. It would provide something extra to these paid subscribers to make it more worth paying for.

But so as not to punish loyal readers who didn’t own the Kindle and couldn’t subscribe, there could be a time decay on these posts that eventually kicks them out to everybody. Put that on my Kindle feature wish list for blog publishers. Actually, this might be possible by offering a separate feed for Kindle readers … only since you can’t password protect it or anything, once that feed address was released in the wild, anybody could simply subscribe to it instead of the main feed.

If anybody is reading any blogs through the Kindle, please let me know what you think of the experience. I’m curious.

Update 5/15/2009 6:05am PST: The Make You Go Hmm Kindle edition is live!

It can be found at the following location: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0029U2NUE

Did this post make you go hmm?

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