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Everyone seems to know and love, or hate, the Amazon Kindle.  It’s easy to love a device that allows you to carry around thousands of books on a tiny device, especially if you read all of them.  However, it’s also really easy for some people to hate it for just how closed it is, and how few file formats it actually supports.  Today, Amazon has given new reasons to add to the lists of love/hate.

The good news

There is some good news, however.  Amazon also announced two new supported file formats: DOCX and RTF.  On second thought, that might not be all that great news.  DOCX support is only experimental like PDF, and might not format perfectly onto the Kindle.  RTF, well, RTF documents could have easily been converted to DOC format before, so it’s really just Amazon saving users the trouble of converting.  So while it really doesn’t solve the issues of the Kindle not supporting EPUB, there’s at least two new files formats, even if they aren’t all that impressive to some.

The bad news

Amazon has announced that file conversions have increased in price.  It used to be that you could get any supported file format converted and sent to your Kindle for just 10 cents.  Now, every file will cost 15 cents per MB, rounded up to the next full MB.  For most file formats this won’t be a problem as a lot of text files tend to be in the KBs, not MBs.  However, for those who want to try out the “experimental” PDF support, that could add up rather quickly as they tend to by at least a few MBs each.

Read [GearDaily]