I don’t own, nor have even ever used a Kindle (Amazon.com’s ebook reader), but this seems like a great idea. Jacqui Cheng, writing in ars technica: Paying for (short) content: Amazon to publish “Kindle Singles”
Amazon is rolling out a separate section of its Kindle store meant for shorter content—meatier than long-form journalism, but shorter than a typical book. Called “Kindle Singles,” the content will be distributed like other Kindle books but will likely fall between 10,000 and 30,000 words, or the equivalent of a few chapters from a novel.
The company believes that some of the best ideas don’t need to be stretched to more than 50,000 words in order to get in front of readers, nor do they need to be chopped down to the length of a magazine article.
“Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format,” Amazon’s VP of Kindle Content Russ Grandinetti said in a statement. (Anyone who has ever read a terrible “business” or “self-help” book consisting of a single idea furiously puffed up into 200 pages of pabulum will no doubt agree with this sentiment.) (highlight mine)
I’ll add books on politics — my passion for some years now — to that puffed up list. And I’d be ecstatic if these books actually stopped at 200 pages; they’re often double that or more. I frequently find myself reading the first 50-60 pages and then skimming the rest. And these are books that I’m genuinely interested in. But I don’t feel that I’m missing anything by skipping most of the filler.
I realize that book size and retail price points are all part of the economics of the print book trade, but perhaps electronic formats will make for saner offerings.
