Why Engadget isn’t on Kindle

I’ve been getting a flood of questions from colleagues, readers, fans, friends, bookworms, etc. asking why Engadget (and the rest of Weblogs, Inc.) isn’t among the blogs being aggregated on Kindle. It’s a fair question with a simple answer. The folks at Amazon did reach out to our team to try to set up a deal, but while I can’t speak to the specifics (the terms of the deal are under nondisclosure), the Kindle-blog business doesn’t necessarily jibe with Engadget’s. Here’s why.

Amazon charges Kindle users to read participating blogs because it has to pay for its EV-DO data network access (a Sprint MVNO they’re calling Whispernet). So long as Amazon is fronting money to move data to its device, it will presumably have to make that money back somehow (hence charging readers to subscribe to blogs). Now, on our end, we’d love to be on every device that aggregates feeds, but we also believe our content should be completely free of charge to those reading. So therein lies the catch-22 — Amazon needs to charge users for delivering content, and we only deliver content by means that doesn’t charge our users.

Of course, we’re still in touch with their team and I’d really like to see something happen. But until then you’ll just have to use the Kindle’s paradoxically free web browser to hit up Engadget. (Yeah, I know, I don’t get why they charge for blogs but make browsing free, either. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?)

How do you read your feeds?

Yeah, you could say I regularly work hours that many would call, well, kind of crazy — and when I’m not working I tend to stay fairly busy with something or another. But if there’s one thing I can’t seem to get ahead and stay ahead of most days, it’s my feeds. I have about 90-100 feeds in my NetNewsWire (maybe 30 of those are high throughput sources), and it still seems like there’s often simply too much content to mesh with the level of time I have to get a handle on it (thus resulting in a the frequent and unfortunate use of mark all as read, and a gradually shrinking OPML). Naturally, the irony isn’t lost on me; trust me, Engadget readers experiencing news overload have my complete sympathy. It’s not like Engadget doesn’t rack up more unread articles in my aggregator than almost any other publication I subscribe to, too (save linkregators like Reddit and Digg).

Right now I think Scoble reigns as champ of the feed-obsessed — seriously, have you seen the dude’s OPML?. He uses “impressions” (glances at stories, not deep reading), but I’m definitely curious to know what aggregators people live in, and how other heavy individual feed reading individuals get their intake without missing any of the good stuff and without scheduling their lives around RSS.