Amazon Claimed OakLeaf Blog Feed Too Large and Overly Illustrated for Kindle Edition
Amazon has made the OakLeaf Systems blog available for the Kindle for about a year. I occasionally receive $10 or so as my share of subscription proceeds.
On 3/13/2011, I received the following message from the Amazon’s Kindle Publishing for Blogs group:
Dear Publisher,
We noticed your blog (listed below) has not updated for more than 60 days.
Blog Title: OakLeaf Systems
Blog ASIN: B0029U16XO
On investigating the feed URL, we received the following error message:
Feed Error: XML error in feed. Details : feed.xml:603:0: junk after document element Feed URL registered with Kindle Publishing: http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml [Emphasis added.]
Kindle customers expect to receive frequent updates for blogs and news feeds to which they subscribe. Because blogs should update at least once per month, we are canceling blogs that have not updated in more than 60 days. Accordingly, if you do not fix this issue and publish new updates within 7 days, we will remove your publication from the Kindle Store.
If you have any questions or concerns, please write to us at kindle-publishing-blogs@amazon.com.
This message surprised me because I update the blog at least three times per week. I replied on the same day:
Hi,
... [Copy of preceding message]
This blog is updated almost on a daily basis. See http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com.
I use Windows Live Writer, which supports XHTML, for authoring. The Atom feed displays as expected in IE8’s Feed reader. Here’s an example of the first page of today’s feed:
Here’s the feed in Mozilla FireFox 3.6:
Note that this blog has exceptionally long posts.
Something appears to [be] wrong with your Atom reader.
Please advise status.
Thanks,
Roger Jennings
OakLeaf Blog
Microsoft Access Blog
I received an acknowledgment of my message the next day. Notice that I didn’t take umbrage at Amazon’s characterizing my blog’s content as “junk.”
After prompting, I received the following response on 4/4/2011:
Hello Roger,
Your blog started publishing regularly to Kindle.
After some investigation, our technical team identified that your blog has too many images and articles resulting in a huge increase in your Kindle Blog's size. This made the blog error out in the Kindle Publishing pipeline.
To prevent this issue in future, we suggest you to reduce the number of images provided in the Kindle Blog feed.
…
Best regards,
Srinivasa Krishnan
http://www.amazon.com
I don’t think I’m ready to write an AtomPub filter to accommodate Kindle’s limitations. The Kindle delivers illustrated books and thick magazines, such as The New Yorker and PC Magazine; why not lavishly illustrated blogs like mine? Hopefully, they’ve fixed the “Kindle Publishing pipeline.”
Guess I’ll need to buy a Kindle to see how Amazon renders my blog. In the meantime, I’ve added a permalink to the Kindle edition in the left frame.
Atom 1.0 site feed
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