Amazon to Charge by Megabyte for Personal Docs

You knew it was too good to last and the abundance of tools that let you get all your RSS feeds downloaded to your Kindle via Whispernet, essentially at no charge, has apparently forced a change. Although Amazon has always said they would charge a dime a download (essentially $3/month for a daily newspaper feed, for those using this type of service), they have yet to have charged anyone at all. Today, however, they have announced that not only will they start charging these fees (on May 4), but that they have increased the charge to 15 cents per megabyte, rounded up to the nearest megabyte (so a fifty percent increase in the lowest charge). Looks like those two newspapers a day I was reading thru Calibre (plus a weekly and monthly) would cost me about $14.25 a month (at the current average file sizes). Time to turn off the automatic downloads and start using the USB cable instead. Now more than ever, I wish the Kindle had wireless or bluetooth support, so transferring files at home were easier to accomplish (the USB connection on my computer is on the rear, back and in the floor).

On the positive side, free document conversion is still an option (I wish I could set up multiple email addresses for this, since we have four Kindles on one account, but it is manageable) and RTF and DOCX support is being added.