A belated note about Kindle, Amazon’s new e-book reader, which was launched last week.

I am less interested in the product itself than some of the reaction to it, which was an example of the abuse the inner circle of technology and media bloggers metes out to anything that does not fit its vision of how the world ought to work. There is a good review of some of the comments here on the FT Tech Blog, written by my colleagues in Silicon Valley.

Kindle’s offence is two-fold. First, it is a proprietary device that does not simply plug into an open network to send and receive data. Second, Amazon is charging Kindle users to download some content to their Kindles - notably blog feeds, which is a bad place to start if you want to please bloggers.

This was bound to bait a lot of digital evangelists and indeed it did. Jeff Jarvis weighed in against both the device itself and its business model. Robert Scoble has just added his two cents. But the most sweeping criticism came from Fred Wilson, the normally genial New York-based venture capitalist, who described Amazon as "stupid" and "losers" for its blog-charging crime (a description he later retracted in the comments on his blog).

I have not seen a Kindle and it strikes me that it will indeed be difficult to charge people small amounts to subscribe to blogs because people are not accustomed to paying for such content. But Amazon is acting perfectly rationally in financial terms.The Kindle’s $399 price includes unlimited access to a mobile data network to download books. Amazon is charging for blog feeds to defray the cost of users downloading other data over the network.

The problem is that Silicon Valley and the blogosphere has a preferred financial model. You pay for the cost of monthly broadband access at home or at work and everything you read or watch on the internet should be free, either because it is given away or because it is advertising-funded.

There is nothing wrong with that model, even if some established media outlets that are used to charging subscriptions in print do not like it. But there are other ways of doing business and I don’t think it is wrong or "stupid" to experiment with them, even if they turn out not to work. In fact, a bit of experimentation with different models seems like a good thing. It is known as innovation in other contexts.

That is not the attitude of a lot of bloggers, who are very quick to start yelling at anyone who does not obey their preferred model for not "getting it" or being idiots. At least Fred Wilson, who as a venture capitalist ought to know better, had the grace to apologise.

November 27th, 2007 in Technology | Permalink