Amazon: Pick up our Shorts

August 19, 2005

Online retailer Amazon.com today launched a digital “Shorts” offering for its customers, a sort of iTunes for book worms. Customers can read samples and shorts from some renowned authors, as well as from works of new authors, for 49 cents each.

�

(Why oh why does one song purchased from iTunes usually cost 99 cents and an entire work of {albeit-short} literature costs a mere 49 cents? I’m pleased that a literary work is cheaper than a song, but I’m pari passu agitated at the implications, i.e., literature is a “harder sell” than a single song.)��

�

The exclusive short-form literature featured in Amazon Shorts will not appear in any printed editions and will only be delivered digitally.

�

Beginning today, customers can find Amazon Shorts from accomplished authors in an array of genres and formats, including alternative chapters and scenes to well-known stories, classic short stories, personal memoirs and one-act plays.

�

Amazon Shorts are copyrighted works, although no digital rights management software is needed to download and read Amazon Shorts. Customers will have three options for reading the purchased piece: view now, wherein the customer is taken to a Web page to read or print the Amazon Short; download via a PDF file; and e-mail, with the entire Amazon Short in a plain-text message sent to the customer-specified e-mail address.

�

Amazon Shorts will also be stored permanently in customers’ “Digital Lockers”; customers are able to print hard copies of purchased Amazon Shorts from any of these formats.

�

“Publishers have always had a hard time selling and marketing the single, short-form work -- the novella, for instance, or the novelette, or its even more diminutive cousin, the novelini -- and these days it’s even harder. Amazon.com has created a new way for authors to get that kind of work out there, which is incredibly exciting,” said author Daniel Wallace in Amazon’s announcement.

�

“It’s my hope that their Shorts program brings a renewed interest to the genre, as well as the opportunity for us to keep in touch with our readers in a really direct, fun way between books.”

�

Some authors involved with the Amazon Shorts include the following: Danielle Steel; New York Times best-selling author Audrey Niffenegger;�Big Fish author Daniel Wallace;�Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes; fantasy best-selling author Terry Brooks; medical-thriller writer Robin Cook; dubbed “Faulkner of crime fiction” James Lee Burke; renowned novelist and award-winning short-storier Ann Beattie; and prolific travel writer Pico Iyer (who has “departed from his usual travel pieces to write about a place he has never been”).

�

---

DRB