A few days ago I mentioned in a post that Crossed Genres would no longer be offering new releases (of the magazine or otherwise) on Amazon’s Kindle. I’ve gotten a few queries as to why, so I’ll give a brief answer.

First, understand that Kindle has been kind of a pain in the ass for us. The actual creation process is generally fairly simple, but we’ve had some larger problems, including:

• A long time ago (maybe 9 or 10 months), I tried to contact Kindle about setting up customer subscriptions to the Crossed Genres Kindle edition. They never responded. So I tried again. Still nothing. I could only conclude that Kindle isn’t interested in making “small fry” subscriptions available.
• Back on January 2 I posted about Amazon’s absurd email regarding our right to publish CG content. Go read that post for details.

These things didn’t leave us with the best feelings regarding Kindle, but on their own weren’t quite enough to make us abandon the format altogether.

What really has been frustrating us, especially over the last few months, is Amazon’s insistence that they are licensing books to customers – not selling them. Cory Doctorow gives a good summation of the problem here. This, coupled with the fact that we are firmly anti-DRM, means that we can’t in good conscience continue to publish our content with them. We don’t want to support digital publishing methods we don’t believe in.

Crossed Genres will continue to be available on .pdf and .prc (mobi pocket) for download, as well as in print. We’re also going to explore possibly publishing through Fictionwise (if they start accepting new publishers again) or Smashwords. If Amazon ever pulls its collective head out of whatever dark crevasse it’s in, then we’ll reconsider this decision.