If it works for iTunes… Online retailer Amazon.com is offering digital-only bits of literature - Amazon Shorts - for 49 cents each, including samples from new authors, alternate chapters and scenes to well-known stories, one-act plays, classic short stories and memoirs from writers, reports Information week. Buyers can read the works or print them from the Amazon site, download them as PDF files or request that they be emailed as plain text.
Steve Kessel, Amazon.com's VP of digital media, is quoted by Reuters as saying, "We hope that by making short-form literature widely and easily available, Amazon.com can help to fuel a revival of this kind of work."
Publishers have always had a hard time selling and marketing the single, short-form work - the novella, or the novelette, or the even shorter "novelini" - he said.
