I came across news this morning that Amazon is adding support for RTF, PDF (experimental?), and DOCX to its Personal Document Service for the Kindle. This service allows you to view your personal documents on your Kindle by emailing them to a special @amazon email address, where they will be sent to your Kindle over the wireless network for a fee. Oh, and the fee is changing from 0.10$/document:

This fee is now based on the size of your file. The fee for Personal Document Service (via Whispernet) is 15 cents per megabyte rounded up to the next whole megabyte.

So under no circumstances will it cost you less to view your own documents on your Kindle.

This ridiculous limitation was built into the Kindle by Amazon. There is no reason why you could not connect it to your PC via USB (for example) or via wireless and transfer as many files as you like to your heart's content. But Amazon decided instead to make a few pennies (now probably more than a few pennies) of each file transfer. They also have the nerve to charge $400 for what is essentially a high-tech razor. It’s a platform for making money: if they have to charge so much for it, it must not be a good moneymaker.

To their credit, they appear to be getting away with it, although I'm not sure I would consider the Kindle a runaway success.

My hope is that someday someone is going to get this mix right, and will give us a device that will allow us to view our own documents without charging us for the right to do so.

Note to Amazon: You might want to consider adding a link to the Kindle product page on the Kindle Blog...