As the media shower for Kindle enters its second day the blogosphere remains saturated with Kindle related posts.
Forget the design, forget the compatibility issues, forget the price tag, the glaring day after issue is the potential copyright problems around the Kindle offering paid subscriptions to blogs that are otherwise available to all for free on the internet.
I emailed Ron Hogan of GalleyCat fame after I realized that he was unaware that GalleyCat was available as a Kindle blog subscription for $1.99 a month. In a post yesterday he was relating author Seth Godin’s experience with Amazon and Godin’s decision not to allow Amazon access to his books and blog content unless it was offered for free.
Hogan remarked “Kindle apparently allows readers to subscribe to certain blogs for a small monthly fee.”
Apparently no one told him that GalleyCat was part of the Kindle blog offering.
Granted mediabistro, which GalleyCat is a property of, was recently sold to JupiterMedia so with a new sheriff in town you would expect some changes but not making your content providers aware that their content will be sold on a third party site strikes me as a little scandalous.
I understand Hogan is a “free”lancer and I am sure somewhere in the fine print of his contract or in the sale documents between mediabistro and JupiterMedia it says that they have “free” reign with his content but, at minimum, you don’t sell the map without informing the people that put you on the map.