Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader
has already inspired hope for new digital business models for book and
newspaper publishers. Now the Kindle wants to do business with bloggers too..
On Wednesday, Amazon unveiled a better program that pays bloggers for Kindle subscriptions to their posts.
The Kindle comes with an
experimental Web browser that allows users to surf ordinary Web sites. But for
the sake of convenience, Amazon also sells Kindle subscriptions to a select
list of blogs that are automatically updated and made available on the device’s
home screen. Those subscriptions can cost as much as $2 per month.
Under the new program, Amazon will
pay registered bloggers 30% of its subscription fee – pretty low, considering
that Apple gives iPhone developers a 70% cut on sales of software applications
for the device. So that’s about 60 cents per reader, per month, for the most
expensive blogs.
There are no upfront costs: Bloggers
just have to register with Amazon, and give the company information on where to
send the subscription revenue.
Amazon won’t let authors set the
price of their blogs (or give them away for free.) “Amazon will define the
price based on what we deem is a fair value for customers,” the company says on
its Web site.
Still, by our math, at a $2 per
month price point, a blogger could make $50,000 per year with just 7,000 annual
subscribers. Not too shabby.
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