As my own post might indicate there's been a lot of mixed feelings about Amazon's new feature to allow subscriptions to any blog to be sold on the Kindle. Levi Asher signed LitKicks up saying "Amazon appears to be showing conviction, focus and flexibility in the way they are evolving the product" while Ed Champion lambasted the program saying "I cannot possibly give away so many of my rights for a mere 30% of the cut." This lead to an intense debate between the two of them on Twitter (@asheresque and @drmabuse respectively). Follow the Reader probably offered the most in depth criticism of the service. After consideration of the arguments, I have decided not to offer this blog on the Kindle. Not that I think there would have been any great demand for it.

I'm extremely torn about Amazon's new service that allows you to sell a subscription to your blog to Kindle users. On the one hand, more readers is good and an extra revenue stream is always welcome (Fun fact: Wet Asphalt doesn't usually even make back its costs in hosting/domain fees). On the other hand, I'm reluctant to ask people to pay for something they can get online for free (even online using the Kindle's own web browser). Furthermore, the terms are like this:

[Q:] Do I get paid for making my blog available on Kindle? [A:]Yes.You will get paid 30% of the monthly blog subscription price for every subscriber to your blog. Please see the terms and conditions for details. [Q:] Can I set the price for my blog? [A:] No. Amazon will define the price based on what we deem is a fair value for customers. [Q:] Can I make my blog free? [A:] No, Amazon will define the price based on what we deem is a fair value for customers.

So 1) only 30% for my content? What a ripoff! 2) Amazon will define the price based on what we deem fair value for customers? What does that mean? It seems like your giving up a little too much control over your content to Amazon, without any input. It would be MUCH better for both bloggers and Kindle users if Amazon allowed you to set your own price including offering blogs for free, like Apple does with the iTunes App Store. (And like the iTunes App Store, this would be more about adding value to sell more products than making money from the service itself.) It's possible that Amazon is just desperate for any way to make more money with whatever they have to pay for always-on 3G service. But whatever the reason, these terms are not great.

So what do you, my faithful readers think? Should we offer Wet Asphalt on the Kindle or not?

Recently, Twitter caused some grumbling by limiting the number of API calls to its service from third party applications. This means that the Twitter apps people use most, like TweetDeck or the various iPhone applications, have to throttle their own users in order to use the service. (TweetDeck, for instance, introduced a maximum number of API calls per user per a specific time period.) Now, Twitter has caused a much bigger uproar by making it so users can't see @ replies to users they don't follow. That means if I follow you, and you tweet at someone else, I don't get to see your tweet. No one's really sure why they did this; they say it's a "reponse to user behavior" (whatever that means), and at least one person has suggest it's in response to people tweeting celebrities that don't tweet them back. However, as most of Twitter knows by now, this is a terrible, terrible idea. Most of the people I've found to follow I've found because other people were having interesting conversations with them. And I suggest an alternate theory: Twitter is doing this to reduce the number of tweets it has to serve to users (fewer tweets served to fewer users) and thereby reduce their load on the system. Because with Twitter growing at such an alarming rate, it seems like their system might be getting taxed.

Which begs the question: Will Twitter scale? If Twitter gets much larger (and it's getting bigger by the day) will it soon get to the point where their infrastructure simply won't be able to handle the traffic. And if that happens, Twitter will very suddenly go from the hottest thing on the planet to dead as a doornail, ala Friendster. In any case, if they don't do something quick to accommodate users cranky about limited API calls and replies not working like they want, someone else is going to come along with a Twitter replacement and kill them. Again, ala Friendster.

EDIT: new blog post from Twitter supports my theory about scalability

The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn't have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever.

Read: We don't have the infrastructure to support all those tweets.

Massive spoilers below.

EDIT: added more notes at the bottom.

Imagine if you will that there's a magic red goop, and that a single drop of this goop—one drop!—can create a black hole. Now imagine that a whole man-sized container of the stuff (which one needs, for some reason, because a few drops just won't do the job) smashes in the middle of a starship. Now imagine that for some reason that ship is still around with a giant black hole forming all around it and you can have a nice conversation with the captain of that and then decide for some reason you need to shoot him with your phasers and photon torpedoes because the black hole hasn't completely destroyed them already.

Okay, now imagine that you sky dive from space into the atmosphere of a planet. There is no sense of burning up on reentry or even any sort of heat. Then you land on a giant laser drill in the stratosphere. This drill is hanging off of a ship in space and is drilling a hole in the planet, but there's no sense at all of the ship maintaining geosynchronous orbit; indeed the drill seems to be moving around quite a lot and yet is still drilling this big hole. Oh yeah, and the reason you need a big hole? Because you want to put a drop of red black hole goo in the center of the planet to destroy it because for some reason creating a black hole anywhere in the general vicinity of the planet isn't good enough. (Why do they bother even using the term "black hole" if they have no desire to have anything to do with what a black hole is or does?) But okay, so then you land on your space drill. You whip off your helmets and have no trouble at all breathing up in the stratosphere. Then for some reason the drill is manned, and the bad guys come out and you all have a big kung fu fight up on the top, complete with flips and acrobatics. On a platform in the open air in the stratosphere. And nobody just blows right off.

I don't think I've ever in my life seen an ostensible Science Fiction movie with such complete contempt for science. Space Balls had better science. Godzilla had better science (all of them).

Amazon is now charging by the megabyte to put your personal documents on the Kindle. Or, you know, you could buy a Sony Reader and do it for free.

Happy May Day everyone! There's a holiday we don't celebrate enough in the US.

Possibly not conincidentally, today is also Buy Indie Day, so everybody find an independent bookstore and give them your moneys in exchange for, sweet, delicious books!

To the public at large, as to me, it seems like a no brainer that ebooks should cost much less than print books. You don't have to pay for printing, after all, nor do you have to pay much for distribution, and you don't have to give the same kind of cut to ebook stores, who, after all, don't have to pay things like rent. And yet, there's been some rumblings from the industry about how lower costs of ebooks will hurt publishing (via @RonHogan), and that ebooks still cost money (via @bookavore); "We still pay for the author advance, the editing, the copyediting, the proofreading, the cover and interior design, the illustrations, the sales kit, the marketing efforts, the publicity, and the staff that needs to coordinate all of the details that make books possible in these stages."

Really? Because it seems to me that the amount of money the publisher has to spend on printing, distribution and the cut given to the bookstore are a HUGE percentage of the cost of a book. (Especially considering the paltry advances and marketing budgets publishers seem to have these days.) And the one thing I haven't seen from anyone is hard numbers. Listen, publishing industry, you want me to believe you that ebooks should cost more than $10 a pop? Show me. How much does it cost to print books in various print runs? How much is distribution and how much does the bookstore get? How much do you lose in returns from the bookstores when they don't sell the books. (A non-issue with ebooks.) All that isn't enough to give me a steep discount? Alright, convince me. I'm listening. Because right now it sure sounds like bullshit.

Edit: The first link did not say what I thought it said. Apparently the author was complaining about Amazon demanding the same discounts (to them) on ebooks that it gets for print books. I agree with the author that this is crazy. Ebooks cost much MUCH less to store than print books, and so the bookstore should get less money for them.

The breaking news is that Amazon has bought Lexcycle, creators of the Stanza iPhone app. Readerville offers some comentary. As pointed out in that post, the big questions here are will Stanza continue to be able to read open ebook formats like ePub (unlike both the Kindle app and the Kindle itself)? Will it still be able to buy books from B&N-owned Fictionwise? Or will they cripple it so that it's just a watered-down version of their Kindle app (or perhaps fold some of its features into the Kindle app and scuttle the Stanza app completely)?

Stanza is, in my mind, one of the best things about the iPhone/iPod Touch and may be the best ebook reading software I've ever used. (It beats out my beloved Sony Reader mainly because it supports PRC (Palm Doc) files, though I still use the Sony Reader for its e-ink screen.) I will be very sad if Amazon destroys it, but if they do I suppose it just leaves a void for other companies to fill, in the way that the destruction of Napster allowed the rise of Bittorrent. Time will tell.

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