A failure for Amazon

kindlefeeder.com is a service for Amazon Kindle owners that lets you aggregate your favorite feeds and have them delivered to your Kindle in a convenient, easy-to-navigate format. You can also have your feeds delivered to your Kindle automatically on a schedule.

While most of the Amazon-related news these days is about the next-generation Kindle that everyone expects to be announced on February 9th, there are still things going on with the old version.

The mere fact that kindlefeeder.com exists and is not a part of Amazon means that Amazon isn’t meeting all the needs and desires of their customers.  That’s okay, and to be expected.  They can’t think of everything.

But the fact that the site owner is now afraid that what he’s done (make the Kindle more valuable by providing additional services for it) is actually against Amazon’s terms of service means that Amazon probably did think of this, and decided they didn’t want people doing it.

This insistence on controlling every word that goes onto your Kindle is the main reason I didn’t buy one, and won’t buy generation two unless it stops.  It means that Amazon hasn’t figured out how to properly monetize the Kindle.  In general, the company is pretty open with how you use their services – they try to help people sell their stuff in the Amazon marketplace, they provide online storage and processing power for people to purchase, as well as numerous other things.  These services are very open because Amazon knows how to charge you.  Each gigabyte of data you send or store using their service has a calculable price.

But the money is much fuzzier with the Kindle, and so it’s much more restricted.  In the long run, this is a mistake.  Basing your business on preventing people from doing what they want with your device will always limit your market.  You may make more money now, but you leave so much potential on the table.

Link: kindlefeeder.com – RSS and Atom Feed Subscriptions For Your Amazon Kindle, via MakeUseOf.com – Cool Websites and Tools (#258)

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