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Amazon to transform the publishing industry with Kindle Singles?

by Parm Mann on 13 October 2010, 11:13

Tags: Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN)

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Amazon's Kindle marketplace quickly is becoming the publishing industry's equivalent to Apple's iTunes.

And, in its efforts to make content more accessible to bookworms, the Kindle marketplace will soon offer consumers the option of purchasing either full-length books or Kindle Singles.

The Singles, announced earlier this week, are described by Amazon as "books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book".

Featuring between 10,000 and 30,000 words (comfortably less than over 50,000 in an average novel), the Kindle Singles will provide bite-sized reading at a price "much less than a typical book".

Amazon is hoping its Singles initiative will appeal to authors wanting to publish "a single killer idea, well researched, well argued and well illustrated - whether it's a business lesson, a political point of view, a scientific argument, or a beautifully crafted essay on a current event."

The idea appears to have plenty of potential, as the shorter Singles could be ideal for consumption on smaller Kindle-enabled devices such as the iPad, iPod touch, iPhone and BlackBerry.

Although a price structure for Singles is yet to be revealed, Amazon may also hold more sway over third-party content as it may be able to circumvent publishers and work with authors directly.

There's no launch date as yet, but if you're interested in seeing your work published as a Kindle Single, Amazon's encouraging "writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers" to show their interest by dropping a line to digital-publications@amazon.com.



HEXUS Forums :: 1 Comment

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The idea is an interesting one, offering a short story format to allow authors to write a book of any length they choose. As long as the plan isn't to abridge current novels into a “bite-size” chunk, then this is a good idea.


Where I can see it go wrong is if they plan on selling cheap “summaries” of popular books, forcing authors and publishers to accept less money for something that's taken a lot more time to create.