Amazon Opens Kindle Up for Development: App Store Ahoy [Kindle]
Amazon just announced that the Kindle will have its own app store, with partners ranging from publishers like Zagat to, believe it or not, game makers like EA. E-ink gaming? What?
Says Amazon's vice president for Kindle:
We knew from the earliest days of the Kindle that invention was not all going to take place within the walls of Amazon. We wanted to open this up to a wide range of creative people, from developers to publishers to authors, to build whatever they like.
In that spirit, they've opened up development to selected partners (not everyone, yet—a wider release will come later this month) to create apps for the Kindle platform. There'll be three kinds of apps: Free, one-time payment, and monthly payment. Interestingly, because the Kindle is sold without a monthly fee for the wireless connection, these developers will have to pay 15 cents per megabyte for content delivery. They'll keep 70% of the revenue after those expenses are recouped by Amazon—more info on that stuff here.
There are also some basic limits on both bandwidth and app size. Free apps must be smaller than 1MB and use less than 100KB of data per user per month. One-time purchase apps and monthly apps both have the same data usage limit as free apps, but have a size limit of 100MB (although any app larger than 10MB can't be downloaded wirelessly—gotta do it via USB).
Amazon expects to start adding apps "sometime later this year," which is a nice vague thing to say in January. They'll also retain control over the types of apps added, restricting offensive apps, VoIP apps, viruses, that kind of thing. Now: What kind of things are we likely to see in a Kindle app store?
The Kindle is extremely limited by its hardware, most importantly its e-ink screen. The kind of glacial refreshes that are acceptable while reading a book make it totally useless for pretty much any game. The only ones that can deal with the limited screen are essentially pen-and-paper games, like Sudoku, word games (crossword puzzles, Scrabble) and, um, hangman. Scrabble is a fair bet to make an early appearance, since it's owned by EA, one of the two partners specifically named in the NYTimes announcement.
Other apps mentioned include searchable travel books, like a Zagat app that could find, say, local restaurants with specific criteria. But apps like that are really better suited for smartphones, which is an argument you could make about the entire idea of a Kindle app store. We'll have to wait until the plan actually launches before we see if it was a good decision—and who knows, by then the Apple Tablet will probably have revolutionized the publishing industry, solved the economic recession and rescued the world's kittens from the world's trees. [Amazon and NYTimes 1 and 2]