Kindle Culture Blog Subscription on Kindle for $0.99

The Kindle Culture blog is now available for the Kindle through Amazon for a monthly fee of 99¢.

A lot has been written recently about why anyone would pay for something they can get for free with a few clicks, which I generally agree with. But I also think the same can be said for paying to get newspapers delivered to your door when many of them are available on the Internet for free. I personally subscribe to the AP Entertainment blog on my Kindle for 99¢ because I would rather have those headlines collected and presented to me every day than go looking for them, and that service is worth 3¢ a day to me.

That said, potential subscribers should know that Kindle Culture is dedicated to the social, cultural, artistic and political expressions on, about, and for the Amazon Kindle, and sometimes features images and links to video clips that aren't fully accessible on the Kindle. Readers who are looking for daily news, tips and information about the Kindle would be better served by a number of other great Kindle blogs that are now available, all for 99¢. Three of my favorites are Abhi Singh's Kindle Review, Kindle Books - iReader Review, Andrys Basten's A Kindle World and Stephen Windwalker's Kindle Nation Daily. I plan to take a look at these and other Kindle-focused blogs as seen through the eyes of the Kindle in a series of posts coming in the weeks ahead.

Kindle to the Stars

Here's a cool freebie that was recently mentioned on the Kindle 2.0 Blog--a set of star charts comprised of 14 PNG files and optimized for the Kindle. Created by Roban Hultman Kramer using PP3--Celestial Chart Generation software by Torsten Bronger, the images were designed to cover the entire sky, with significant overlap. As he explains on the page where the charts can be downloaded, "After my brother generously gave me an Amazon Kindle for my birthday, I started looking around the web for star charts that would be usable on it. The Kindle has an 600x800 pixel eInk display with four shades of gray. This means that most star charts meant for computer screens don't have enough contrast or are overly reliant on color, and most star charts meant to be printed require too high a resolution to be easily used on the Kindle. Compounding these problems is the Kindle's primitive image display interface, which doesn't allow scrolling of over-sized images."

After considering various planetarium programs for his charts, Roban found PP3 to be "perfect for this purpose." For more info, stargazers can check out this thread on the Amazon Kindle forum.