Calling Kindle owners (and would-be owners)

By Alex Foster | Sun 29th August 2010 - 10:33 am

The Amazon Kindle is a new, ~~cynical way of Amazon selling books without having to pay postage~~ modern format of reading content without having to waste trees.

Amazon have recently redesigned their e-reader and is selling the new one with much fanfare. You can pre-order it right now and have it arrive just in time for conference – which hopefully will mean you can read your conference papers on it, if you have opted for paperless confereeing this year.

And, what, I hear the tumults call, will happen to Lib Dem Voice?

Well, worry ye not, for LDV is also available on Kindle. Click here for a trial subscription: LibDemVoice on Amazon Kindle

Slightly strangely, given that practically no costs are incurred by anyone other than us, a subscription will cost you a princely £1.99 a month. We submitted the blog to Amazon and it will be us who benefit from nearly all of that money – we were not in the same boat as Iain Dale who was a little surprised to find others charging for his content.

Of course, if you think the content we produce here is worth £2 a month, and you don’t have a Kindle, you are more than welcome to cut out the middle-person and donate it to us directly by standing order.

You can also donate money to us indirectly by using any of the book or technology links on our blog to buy stuff from Amazon. As Amazon Associates, we take a small cut of your spend.

You may also be interested in:

Millennium Elephant on Book Format wars
What I put on my Kindle before it even arrived
LDV Editor Mark Pack’s blog for Amazon Kindle
Why this post isn’t called Kindle in the Wind

5 Comments

Simon G 29th Aug '10 - 10:39am

For those who may not now, there’s a free Kindle app for the iPad so you don’t necessarily have to buy a Kindle.
Andrew Suffield 29th Aug '10 - 12:51pm

I’m not touching Kindle for precisely one reason: you don’t own the books, you rent them under highly restrictive terms that boil down to “you can read them until we decide to take them away”.

One of amazon’s notably dodgy practices here is that if you order other physical products from amazon, and return too many of them for whatever reason, they close your account and you lose anything you bought on Kindle.
Jane 29th Aug '10 - 5:25pm

My Kindle is on order and should arrive during the next few days. However, since I am in Canada, my Kindle is coming from Amazon.com. I won’t be able to take up the LDV subscription because it is only available for UK customers only.

Oh well.
Stuart 30th Aug '10 - 12:05am

@Andrew Suffield: there are loads of books available for the Kindle that you can download free, so even if they are on a, sort, of, semi-permanent loan, that seems like a good deal to me.
Fuqdat uhypocrites 31st Aug '10 - 9:17pm

For those who may not know there are other ereaders out there.. some with superior features to the kindle.. But Amazon isn’t a greedy company blah blah blah