Amazon Launches Its Collection Of Short Works, Kindle Singles

In October, Amazon announced its “Kindle Singles,” product, which introduced short stories and digital pamphlets to the e-book reader’s store. In the company’s words, Kindle Singles are “twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book” and generally 5,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages). Today, Amazon is debuting Kindle Singles, its collection of short works.

Kindle Singles are available to both Kindle device and app users, and priced between $0.99 and $4.99. Amazon says the first set of published Singles include original reporting, essays, memoirs and fiction. While the company says that “the response to our announcement of Singles has been great,” it’s unclear how many Singles have been added to the Kindle bookstore.

Kindle Singles are important because the new format gives bloggers and writers out there who may not have the time to write a long-form book, the opportunity to publish a pamphlet or shorter work. And it seems fairly easy for writer to publish these works, especially since Amazon is looking to build up its collection of content in this genre.

For an example of a Kindle Single, checkout ZDNet editor Larry Dignan’s The Business Of Media: A Survival Guide.

It’s unclear how well this format will perform in terms of downloads, but Amazon has certainly been able to collect short works from a number of well-known authors, including Jodi Picoult, Evan Ratliff and Nic Marks (A TED book).

Crunchbase

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Company: Amazon

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Launch Date: 1994

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Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN), is a leading global Internet company and one of the most trafficked Internet retail destinations worldwide. Amazon is one of the first companies to sell products deep into the long tail by housing them in numerous warehouses and distributing products from many partner companies. Amazon directly sells or acts as a platform for the sale of a broad range of products. These include books, music, videos, consumer electronics, clothing and household products. The majority of Amazon’s...

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