The feeds are not meant to be ‘sold’ – blog owners choose to offer feeds and people can get them for free or pay something to get them in a well-organized manner maybe.

1. Kindlefeeder uses prc files now, and their own server has downloads you can do from there, not causing Amazon servers any load.

2. A combo-feed download takes about one minute. So it costs Amazon about one minute.

3. Anyone browsing with the Kindle to read blogs online in readers or whatever will mean a lot of live reading that goes on for maybe hours, certainly more than one minute.

4. They will then cost Amazon much more than a one minute download via whispernet.

5. those of us who also pay Amazon for specially formatted blogs will download, this way, blogs we would not pay for but the blog owners allow the feeds.

6. Amazon gets a LOT of my money so I feel no guilt about using a one minute download once a day (at most — I usually skip a few days). Amazon factored in wireless use when they priced the Kindle in a way that many perceive as ‘high.’

7. Don’t know where you got the idea I felt the Kindle was too high. I usually say it incorporates 24/7 free wireless costs, and Jeff Bezos verified this again in mid-June when he told the Wired Conference he could have charged maybe $99 for the device and then recouped his expenses and hopefully a profit by charging the usual wireless charges of $60 per month. Or $720 a year + $99 = $799 instead of $360
(now $299).

8. I love to browse on the Kindle when away from home and sometimes I read on the Net when a Kindle blog links me to something I want to see. The bookmarks Amazon sets for us encourages us to do experimental browsing, as do the ‘Google’ and ‘wikipedia’ options on the status bar of almost every area that involves typing (or highlighting) a word.

– Andrys

Andrys, I get that you’re uncomfortable with being referred to a freeloader, and I get why you don’t see yourself as one. And, at most, you could be considered in the ‘borderline’ category, and I’m not sure you see why. It’s not that you’ve used Whispernet bandwidth for non-Amazon content. Not all blogs are available from Amazon–my personal favorite among them. So, I DO use the Kindle’s browser to access this blog daily and don’t consider it freeloading because I would gladly pay Amazon for this blog were they to offer it. I DON’T use anything other than the browser–any service–because what services like Kindlefeeder are doing are profiting from bandwidth Amazon provides so you can enjoy it’s offerings, and even a few things they don’t offer. It’s just wrong to charge for assisting someone obtaining for free someone else intends for sale. And when that happens things stop being free. I was a customer of AOL, back in the beginning. But I travelled a lot for business, and a few of the places I went had no AOL local numbers. Because they had local numbers in virtually every place imaginable at that time, I also had a FREE Juno account for places where AOL didn’t have access. Eventually all the free internet access dried up. Why? Because instead of using it infrequently as a backup service people started spending HOURS online on a free service. They tried all sorts of schemes at first to limit the freeloaders, but eventually what was a great thing for most people was spoiled by the people who are now “posting on forums wondering if there’s a way to tether the kindle to their computer and get free internet.” (I love that analogy, switch11! It is SO TRUE!)

The problem, as I see it, is that if it doesn’t feel wrong for you, deep inside, to take more than “your share,” then services like these will always end up h
having to add a “tax” to keep freeloaders from destroying it for everybody. I wonder whether you would do the same in a more visible venue. For instance, if they were giving away free sodas, would you take one and say, “thank you,” or would you fill up your backpack so you’d have free soda for the week?

As to the price being high to include the bandwidth, what have you been smokin’? Cellular bandwidth, right or wrong, is outrageously expensive and the Kindle is VERY reasonably priced considering it’s components. Amazon would not be making a huge profit on these unless you buy content form them. (This isn’t an unusual strategy, Apple uses it with iPods and iPhones, Sony, MS, and Nintendo do it with game consoles. They bank on you buying content.) It doesn’t entitle them to prevent you from aquiring content elsewhere, but it doesn’t entitle you to obtain other content at their expense, either. The content is where Amazon is making their profit. As much as $300~$500 may be to you, it DOES NOT represent a huge profit to Amazon, nor does it entitle anyone to unlimited free bandwidth.

If I use the wireless in an even less $Time$ spending way than using THEIR bookmarks to go just sit on BBC News or MSNBC news for an hour or so on end, I and Kindle owners who use Amazon’s Kindle web menu are just not ‘freeloader’ and is not a justifiable word for people who quickly download what is usually less than a 1-meg file.

It’s just too inflammatory. Amazon business heads would weigh what Kindle owners pay for from Amazon against what they cost in the few seconds from freely available feeds on this Net.

Amazon is there to make a profit, so they are charging for the email conversion and delivery to the Kindle. The response to this has been anything but severe, from the Kindle community. It was expected and we get the free.kindle.com method if we want. It’s a reasonable business decision and would have been made in any case once they knew what the costs were and what they could recoup or get a profit from.

Also, kindlefeeder has written Amazon to give it a chance to say No Go but has never received a response. It is actually a Plus that the Kindle is capable of this, as the common complaint is that one can receive only Amazon-controlled material to the Kindle. People who receive feeds are generally avid readers, and people who buy Kindles have money even if they’re careful with it.

Since I’m one of those who buy subscriptions from Amazon, in addition to books, they’re making money from me/us.

In the meantime, there are options at Kindlefeeder to download to the computer or to get a prc file downloaded to the Kindle (as you yourself was thinking of doing in response to a note here yesterday) FROM the kindlefeeder server, not going through Amazon’s conversion servers.

We could cut our feeds to short feeds if we want but you mentioned that exposure was more important the revenue at this point.

We’re talking a Send/Download that’s less than a minute that uses the Kindle’s wireless to receive.

And I am talking the reality of their encouraging us to go Sit on websites with their experimental browser, which is far more expensive for them.

Your Amazon-estimated costs figure should include that also instead of the few cents a month that you guessed they had considered. A business has to think of revenue streams – so someday the web-browsing and sitting on websites they’re encouraging Kindle owners to do will see some kind of tiered plan *IF* the browser ever gets really useable.

Again, there’s a cost that we paid for with the cost to us of the Kindle itself, which would not be that expensive without wireless access that has no monthly charges.

And Daniel is paying for his server usage and his own bandwidth in connection with the delivery. Amazon faces the reality of the Net and is dealing with it.

In no way would I encourage people to spend $360 on the K2 unless it had wireless AND we were able to use it for whatever amount of time spent outside the Amazon store.
No sane person would use this web browser for anything but short lookups. But people report using the webbrowser menu and visiting news sites when having to wait for their newspaper subscriptions to arrive.

As time goes on, we’ll know what the limits are, but at this point no one has a good fix on that. The assumptions used here, while quite interesting, don’t justify the word ‘freeloaders.’

When I did budgeting for all kinds of projects, I always figured the stated cost to include all the labor/transportation/delivery costs, everything I could think of, to justify the cost of our charges.
Tasaka’s figure gives us no basis for the calculation and is hearsay at this point.

Recent releases of Calibre do support optional delivery through Amazon’s Whispernet service, and the feature works well.

First, Calibre can’t be accused freeloading off Whispernet bandwidth. As far as I know, Calibre does not offer Whispernet as a content delivery option.

Second, while Feedbooks uses the Whispernet to deliver content, this is a form of Whispernet delivery that is not being subject to the new $.15 charge. The delivery method Feedbooks uses, last I checked, is a direct .mobi download via the Kindle web browser, as opposed to a delivery plus conversion via Amazon’s Kindle document delivery servers. Only the second form of delivery is being charged $.15 per use.

Third, my service, Kindlefeeder services a miniscule portion of the Kindle user base. The active users right now are probably in the few hundreds. Also, Kindlefeeder has always offered 3 methods of delivery, only one of which was based on the Whispernet delivery method that is now being charged. Now Kindlefeeder also offers a fourth .mobi download-based method, just like Feedbooks has been offering for a long time.

Fourth, I didn’t create Kindlefeeder to abuse and exploit a loophole in Amazon’s system. When I wrote the code and initially launched the service, I was under the impression that Amazon *was* charging $.10 per delivery, as Amazon announced the price to be back then. It was only later that I found out that Amazon wasn’t charging, and even then I had no idea how long it would be before they would start charging.

The truth was, I wasn’t afraid so much of the beginning of charges, but of Amazon simply backlisting Kindlefeeder from its document conversion service. I was spending two hundred or so hours coding software that could be rendered useless on Amazon’s whim.

But I went ahead anyway, because I believe that the Kindle is a platform and that the platform should be open. Yes, I was hoping to earning some revenue from the service (which is much smaller than you might think), but I also wanted to demonstrate that third-party, independent developers could make genuinely creative and useful contributions to the platform, which Amazon seems to be slow to recognize. The iPhone has become an application platform. Netflix has released an API. And everyone is better off. Why not the Kindle?

I even argued back then that Amazon should raise the charges on personal wireless content delivery if that was the price we would have to pay to let third party developers develop applications like Kindlefeeder and InstaPaper for Kindle users. Here is the proof: http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/09/14/kindlefeeder-rss-manager-and-feeder/ (see my comments in the comment section).

So while you make a fair point in thinking of Whispernet bandwidth as a “resource” that shouldn’t be over-consumed, I think it’s equally valid to be frustrated at how closed the Kindle is as a platform, and to support and encourage the software developers who try and dare to add useful features to it.

Anyway, that’s my perspective. Thanks for letting me share it.

Now with the fees Amazon is changing behavior.

Andrys – you fall in between freeloaders and users who have no idea all these other options exist.

The freeloaders are the people posting on forums wondering if there’s a way to tether the kindle to their computer and get free internet.
kindle feeder might be a good service – however, your being a kindlefeeder user means you are disregarding that the programmer is using bandwidth he’s not paying for to provide a service and earn goodwill.