I guess Amazon has found a way to charge $3 for a short story.
Why not buy a copy of Analog Magazine, or McSweeney's, or any other good periodical with quality fiction, and get several short stories for the same price?
I think you're missing the point. These are more than short stories:
1. They fall somewhere between a blog post and book. If you have 50 - 100 pages to write on something you either have to turn it into 50 blog posts or 300 page book. The focus here is on length appropriate works.
3. These are non-fiction (at least most of them) works that tend to be by amateur experts. What that means is that they are amateur writers writing on topics they are experts in. This allows my dad to write an Amazon Kindle Single on Vietnam or Economic Development and publish it. This is a huge win for amateur experts!
3. This is just the start, and I expect we'll see a lot of people moving in this direction, particularly people with huge followings. Imagine if someone with 100,000+ reach can sell 5,000 of these every 2 or 3 months.
3. These are non-fiction (at least most of them) works that tend to be by amateur experts. What that means is that they are amateur writers writing on topics they are experts in. This allows my dad to write an Amazon Kindle Single on Vietnam or Economic Development and publish it. This is a huge win for amateur experts!
Sometimes they're also for non-amateur experts publishing something that doesn't slot easily into the classic article / book item. I'm thinking here of Tyler Cowen's _The Great Stagnation_, which I just wrote about: http://jseliger.com/2011/01/26/the-great-stagnation-how-amer... primarily because the material is interesting and useful and partially because it's useful.
Excellent idea! Read the introductions of any of the past 20 years Best American Short Stories books and they always ask the question "Is the short story dead" and lament the decrease in the number of magazines that exclusively publish short fiction. I think there was an experiment in the UK where people could buy single stories printed in map-like format at tube stations.
Editors don't like short stories because you have to have a lot, e.g. at least 5-6, to publish as a decent book, and coming up with that many good short stories is not within everybody's capability (same thing with having to have ~10 songs for a CD). This new medium may just be the thing to spur story writers.
"I wonder if they'll move away from such a heavily curated model at some point."
There's a place for heavy curation... what's needed is more curators who are trusted.
That ought to be possible once 'curation' is separated from the overhead and complexity of traditional publishing, which tends to concentrate influence in the hands of relatively few editor/curators.
Take out the hassle and overhead of publishing, and the curation becomes as light and simple as recording lists of stories people liked, and then subscribing to the lists of people whose opinions you trust.
Other than the size liste in KB, is there anyway to estimate the length of these items prior to purchasing them? I can't see one. (I know "pages" may be an antiquated way of looking at things now that we can dynamically reflow layout, but I would like an idea of what I am getting into before I purchase something.)
Word count is a medium-independent statistic that would be useful here, but strangely this is not provided for eBooks. Meanwhile, Amazon's physical books with the "Look Inside" feature come with a "Text Stats" link that provides the number of words, sentences, characters and more, e.g.:
http://www.amazon.com/Profiles-Courage-John-F-Kennedy/dp/sit...
When I read the headline, my first thought is that they've come full circle, and are releasing Kindles with a single book on them. I had to check and make sure it wasn't April 1st yet.
To paraphrase Alan Kay: "The eBook revolution hasn't happened yet." A particular medium carries practical limitations with it. When new media are introduced, people carry on with the outmoded practical limitations of the old medium.
This happened with vinyl and CDs. Even though artists were no longer limited to two 23 minute sides, many of them carried on in that pattern. (In part to support users of the old media technology.)
This is a good "rock" to look under: examine what the practical limitations of current media are that don't apply to new media.
IDEABOLT: It is well-known that the media constrains the creator, but (as Hofstadter so eloquently explains in Le Ton Beau De Marot) constraints lea to innovation.
AFAIK, currently we have the following new media transformations/revolutions going on (in order of how far they are in the transformation):
1. Music: The old N songs bundles in one container is gone. Note that the replacement of LPs with CDs didn't bring in the revolution, it was just repackaging. MP3 players did it.
2. News: N news items bundled in a paper is getting replaced by news readers that mix and match
3. Book publishing: Natural constraints of having N words in a book (after all, it's hard to publish a book with 20-30 pages, although this seems to be the natural length of many business books)
4. TV: The constraint of watching live has been broken (thanks to DVRs) but programs are still relatively arbitrarily grouped by channels.
In most cases, a new device brings about the major change (MP3 player, iPad, Kindle, DVR). The last frontier, I think is TV, where arbitrary sets of programs are combined into channels which are in turn bundled into sets (i.e. you can't only subscribe to a list of channels you select).
Companies that aim to transform one of these fields should understand that they need to be in the business of producing at least some of the content in that field, they can't just be bit pushers and rehashers. That's why, Amazon should publish books and have short story competitions for Kindle Singlets and Google (and Apple) should buy a TV station or at least a production company.
Companies that aim to transform one of these fields should understand that they need to be in the business of producing at least some of the content in that field, they can't just be bit pushers and rehashers.
Indeed, but as it has happened with Sony, the publishing arm of the company can hobble the device producing arm.
As I see it the problem with the search (Google) is finding trusted sources. Newspapers are dying. We have corporate garbage for news in the U.S. Over the past 4 years I've restricted my news sources to some bloggers. A number of them experts in various areas.
I think this product could be a replacement for newspapers. Instead of an article about today's events one gets a nice technical overview of, say, the events in Tunisia written by an expert. This could fill the medium between full blown research paper and dumbed down news broadcasts.
Agreed. Wouldn't it be nice if there was an Economist-"briefing"-style overview on dozens/hundreds of topics instantly available on the kindle? Like something between the Wikipedia article and a book?
These are ebook-format works at less than book length, for less than full ebook prices (say, a few chapters of a full book, or a very long magazine article).
Explanation 1: Imagine writing a lengthy blog post, article or something similar - and actually getting paid for it. That's what Amazon is trying here. By coming from a different angle, "books", where we have a traditional readiness to pay, Amazon is trying to create a pay-per-article business model.
Explanation 2: a Book needs to have a certain minimum length (80 pages or so). A magazine article has a certain maximum length (20 pages or so). Inbetween, there wasn't a market for selling something, so far. That's what Amazon is trying.
Explanation 3: Most business books actually have a few good core ideas, plus a lot of fluff. The fluff is to get at a minimum length and be at a position where you can actually sell "a thing" (book). It's so widespread that several companies like getabstract started selling just the core stuff. With the core stuff, Amazon gets nothing. This is a ploy by Amazon to get some of this business.
I'm still waiting for someone to allow me to to "scan" my books into a digital format like I can "rip" my cds to an mp3. Once that happens, I'll be 100% digital.
I was hoping for something similar to delicious library - http://www.delicious-monster.com/ - where you scan the bar code and you have access to it in your library :). (yes, there are tons of ways to abuse this, but it'd still be nice)
I love this idea. Just reading about this brought to mind half a dozen books I've read that would undoubtedly be better and more accessible if they were shorter. Until now, those books stood no chance of getting published.
37 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 91.9 ms ] threadWhy not buy a copy of Analog Magazine, or McSweeney's, or any other good periodical with quality fiction, and get several short stories for the same price?
1. They fall somewhere between a blog post and book. If you have 50 - 100 pages to write on something you either have to turn it into 50 blog posts or 300 page book. The focus here is on length appropriate works.
3. These are non-fiction (at least most of them) works that tend to be by amateur experts. What that means is that they are amateur writers writing on topics they are experts in. This allows my dad to write an Amazon Kindle Single on Vietnam or Economic Development and publish it. This is a huge win for amateur experts!
3. This is just the start, and I expect we'll see a lot of people moving in this direction, particularly people with huge followings. Imagine if someone with 100,000+ reach can sell 5,000 of these every 2 or 3 months.
Sometimes they're also for non-amateur experts publishing something that doesn't slot easily into the classic article / book item. I'm thinking here of Tyler Cowen's _The Great Stagnation_, which I just wrote about: http://jseliger.com/2011/01/26/the-great-stagnation-how-amer... primarily because the material is interesting and useful and partially because it's useful.
I wonder if they'll move away from such a heavily curated model at some point.
Editors don't like short stories because you have to have a lot, e.g. at least 5-6, to publish as a decent book, and coming up with that many good short stories is not within everybody's capability (same thing with having to have ~10 songs for a CD). This new medium may just be the thing to spur story writers.
There's a place for heavy curation... what's needed is more curators who are trusted.
That ought to be possible once 'curation' is separated from the overhead and complexity of traditional publishing, which tends to concentrate influence in the hands of relatively few editor/curators.
Take out the hassle and overhead of publishing, and the curation becomes as light and simple as recording lists of stories people liked, and then subscribing to the lists of people whose opinions you trust.
This happened with vinyl and CDs. Even though artists were no longer limited to two 23 minute sides, many of them carried on in that pattern. (In part to support users of the old media technology.)
This is a good "rock" to look under: examine what the practical limitations of current media are that don't apply to new media.
AFAIK, currently we have the following new media transformations/revolutions going on (in order of how far they are in the transformation):
1. Music: The old N songs bundles in one container is gone. Note that the replacement of LPs with CDs didn't bring in the revolution, it was just repackaging. MP3 players did it.
2. News: N news items bundled in a paper is getting replaced by news readers that mix and match
3. Book publishing: Natural constraints of having N words in a book (after all, it's hard to publish a book with 20-30 pages, although this seems to be the natural length of many business books)
4. TV: The constraint of watching live has been broken (thanks to DVRs) but programs are still relatively arbitrarily grouped by channels.
In most cases, a new device brings about the major change (MP3 player, iPad, Kindle, DVR). The last frontier, I think is TV, where arbitrary sets of programs are combined into channels which are in turn bundled into sets (i.e. you can't only subscribe to a list of channels you select).
Companies that aim to transform one of these fields should understand that they need to be in the business of producing at least some of the content in that field, they can't just be bit pushers and rehashers. That's why, Amazon should publish books and have short story competitions for Kindle Singlets and Google (and Apple) should buy a TV station or at least a production company.
Indeed, but as it has happened with Sony, the publishing arm of the company can hobble the device producing arm.
I think this product could be a replacement for newspapers. Instead of an article about today's events one gets a nice technical overview of, say, the events in Tunisia written by an expert. This could fill the medium between full blown research paper and dumbed down news broadcasts.
Dunno how long that'll last with the slash-and-burn situation there lately.
Explanation 2: a Book needs to have a certain minimum length (80 pages or so). A magazine article has a certain maximum length (20 pages or so). Inbetween, there wasn't a market for selling something, so far. That's what Amazon is trying.
Explanation 3: Most business books actually have a few good core ideas, plus a lot of fluff. The fluff is to get at a minimum length and be at a position where you can actually sell "a thing" (book). It's so widespread that several companies like getabstract started selling just the core stuff. With the core stuff, Amazon gets nothing. This is a ploy by Amazon to get some of this business.
1. Subscribe to feeds from longform.org, longreads.com and givemesomethingtoread.com
2. Open interesting articles and save for reading later in Instapaper
3. Set up Instapaper to deliver wirelessly to Kindle
Bam! Instant periodic 'short story' subscription service.