Not really, but Amazon does give authors certain benefits for staying exclusive to Kindle (better promotion, higher royalties etc)
Think of kindle as an app store for books. Anyone can publish their novels there, and you get a certain percentage for every book sold.
You should man. As far as I'm concerned anyone with money problems should atleast explore this avenue. You barely need anything to start with. In fact, I don't even type anymore. Swype for android has an amazing voice recognition engine based on Dragon.
Do you do your own proofreading and editing? How does that work? Legitimately interested...