This is covered by “nonexclusive”. Their distribution of your content on the iPhone doesn’t stop you from letting people access your blog via iPhone feed readers, Safari, etc. Amazon does not ask for or receive an exclusive right to distribute your content on iPhone. They ask for a “nonexclusive” one, meaning that they can take your content onto any platform.

You’re not precluded from publishing anywhere you like. It’s just that Amazon isn’t either.

… display, market, transmit, distribute, and otherwise digitally make available all or any portion of Publications through Amazon Properties (as defined below), for customers and prospective customers to download, access, copy and paste, print, annotate and/or view, including on any Portable Device (as defined below)

Where Portable Device is defined by:

… any device that is capable of supporting the electronic purchase, display and/or management of digital text, graphics, audio, video and/or other content via wireless telecommunications service, Wi-Fi, USB, or otherwise.

Which, unless I’m wrong (and other bloggers out there have pointed this out) this precludes you from publishing your fiction on any other ‘portable device’ (like the iPhone) once you opt in to Amazon’s service.

Which doesn’t make sense, even from Amazon’s point of view. Surely they realize that they’re discouraging bloggers from signing up with this kind of agreement?

@Clare: Thank you. =) Trust me, I don’t like the term either, but we don’t have any other name at the moment, and ‘blog fiction writer’ is clunky at best, and pretty tiring after awhile.

But that’s just a coincidence. I think everything you said is spot-on. Except for the “blookers” part. I still hate that term :-P

1: Worldwide: the internet is everywhere. Trying to stop people in certain locations from accessing certain material is difficult at best. The right has to be worldwide because of the worldwide platform.

2: Nonexclusive: no one should complain about that. Amazon’s saying that whatever rights you grant them do not preclude you from granting those rights to anyone else.

3: Irrevocable: this is probably the part that annoys people most, but let’s face it, copies of what you submit get stored in different places, different caches, different ways. The platform changes, id code mapping slips out of sync, and things fall over and get restored from backups. Even with the best of intentions, there is a possibility that if you revoked a license, your content might remain available on Kindle. There’s also the question of what happens to previously downloaded copies that remain on people’s Kindles.

And then there’s the Kindle reader for iPod, and other possible unforseen ways in which the Kindle reader and associated applications might evolve that would make it difficult to handle a license revocation on a 4-year-old blog post.

Basically, allowing license revocation is a huge can of worms. It’s a very large cost for not a lot of benefit in their eyes. So they require an irrevocable license.

I’m not saying that this is right or just. I’m just saying I can understand why it’s done.