Kindle Tank

This is something that really startled me. I personally love to read magazines. I think it would be really cool if I could get all my magazine subscriptions to be sent to my Kindle. Instead of having stacks of magazines laying around my house that I hate to throw away, I could have them all in digital form sent and saved to my Kindle. However, there are currently only 8 magazines available for the Kindle, yes, just 8.

Maybe this is because the Kindle is so new, or maybe because magazine publishers are not wanting to adapt to the Kindle digital format. However, compared to the number of publications in the other categories, magazines are really behind the 8 ball on this one.

Here are the number of available publications for each category:

• Books - 95,778
• Newspapers - 13
• Blogs - 310
• Magazines - 8

Amazon has generally been marketing the Kindle as a book reader. Evidentially book publishers have no qualms about selling books digitally. The number of books available is huge.

The amount of newspapers I feel is also quite low. Granted, I am not one to want to read multiple newspapers as they all have much of the same content and many of the articles are locally related. I stick with the New York Times and I am a happy camper.

Blogs I am sure are easy to convert to the Kindle format, as they are just a reformatted RSS feed. More blogs in the future would be great, however there would be a potential for a lot of information clutter. I believe it would be easier just to have the blogs I like to read sent to an RSS reader on my computer.

So what is the problem with having a decent selection of magazines for the Kindle?

I am not quite sure. So far my theory is that magazine publishers are reluctant to adopt to the device. What do you think?