One more thing about the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, which I mentioned yesterday. I noted that the inclusion of a cellular radio was the first step in a trend of embedding mobile connectivity in specialized consumer electronic devices — strengthening divergence but also blurring the line of convergence.

In any case, Joel Johnson over at Boing Boing Gadgets makes an interesting point about the way billing for the Kindle’s EV-DO connection is handled. There’s no need for users to take out a subscription for the service. When they order a book or other content, there’s no separate data charge for its delivery — which is quite good. But users have to pay a few bucks a month to have blogs delivered OTA to the Kindle, which seems to be ruffling quite a few feathers. The general argument is “blogs are free, so why should I pay?” I think that’s off the mark since you’re not necessarily paying for the content, but paying to have it regularly delivered OTA. In essence, you’re paying for the connectivity, not the content, as you would with many other mobile services.

But the point Joel makes is that this billing structure is akin to the a la carte plans many people have been clamoring for from cable companies in the US for a long time. The basic idea is that instead of paying a lump sum for 500 channels, consumers could just pay a per-channel fee for the ones they want. (Ignore for the time being that such a system would likely raise their cable bills.) But the resistance to the Kindle plan indicates the pitfalls of such a system, and highlights that while the idea of “only paying for what you want” might sound great in theory, in practice it may not be so great.

This is particularly relevant to mobile because it’s the sort of billing structure that many operators and content providers try to use for mobile services, with little success. There have been so many services launched over the years that cost “just a few dollars a month”, but when users want to access several of them, those small charges add up, and creates a situation that doesn’t work for customers or service providers. Cue Joel again:

Yet two problems arise with this model in the Kindle: first, it puts a financial throttle on the amount of content one can reasonable afford to put on the device. I’m an edge case, perhaps, but I read several hundred sites a day, with thousands of posts and stories. I could easily spend hundreds of dollars a month to get that content pushed to my Kindle—the same content I get for free today.

The issue, of course, is monetization of the content. Amazon can’t afford to incur the data costs from Sprint if every Kindle could download unlimited RSS feeds. If it doesn’t allow straight RSS, it must provide ad-free content feeds from its partners. And if it doesn’t allow ads in the feeds, it needs to pay the content providers somehow. Hence, subscriptions.

Hence, a mess.

Again, this billing structure alone doesn’t make a lot of difference to the Kindle’s overall chances of success, which are slim. But it’s worth noting the widespread resistance to the periodical billing model — and it’s also worth noting the real innovation here, which is the built-in mobile connectivity without the need for a subscription for the end user.