Kobo and the Barnes and Noble Nook Color are not the only E-Reader companies with publishing agreements in place for magazines and newspapers, but it looks like Amazon has gotten into the mix as well.
Amazon is offering a new beta program for publishers to submit content to their service to be displayed on their Kindle line of E-Readers. They are allowing free signups for this service, and you can publish in 5 Languages.
When you are submitting new content to Amazon you have fill out a basic application form and provide URLS for your company. When you submit your form to Amazon, it takes two days in order to be manually validated for the program.
Amazon employs a 70% revenue model to pay publishers per each digital download from their service. People can then read the content via the Kindle, or from devices that have the Kindle Application. So if you have a Blackberry, iPad, Android device and so on, you can read the magazine via that platform as well. Amazon has stated that each submitted application MUST be compatible with those devices in order to be accepted into the program. Amazon has stated that the Kindle will be the first e-readers to display this, with support coming for Android, Apple and Blackberry sometime in the future.
The Amazon Kindle Publishing for Periodicals will go into effect on December 1st and has offered an beta application available for publishers and developers. This also a new beta program designed to assist publishers to submit their magazine to the store. It also helps with conversion tools for amazons proprietary ebook formats from a maelstrom of other formats, including, xml, html, epub, to the feed format Amazon demands which is NITF, XHTML and RSS formats.
Now there is a few drawbacks for this program, for one, it only allows USA Based publishers to submit content for sale via Amazon. They claim they will open up other markets soon, but they said the same thing about Blogs for Kindle, five months ago. Maybe they will speed up the process due to the imminent launch of Apples new Publishing service, mainly directed at the iPad.
If you want to apply for Amazons new program for Magazine and Newspapers program click HERE.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
