Introducing Kindle Singles

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.

Thankyou for introducing me to longform.org & longreads.com - both are excellent!

Thanks for mentioning Instapaper's Kindle conversion option - I'd never heard of it despite using the site every day for the last few months!

sendmeastory.com is also great. It picks up a strory a week from longform.org and send it to you (or your Kindle/Instapaper).

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.

In my opinion the Economist provides some good in depth overviews of events, such as those currently taking place in Tunisia.

Distribution and convenience.

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.

Singles meet and exchange their Kindles to know each other... or just use the lending feature?

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...

At the bottom of the Product Description, it has pagecount in parentheses (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004K1F9KG/ref=docs-os-doi_... says (34 pages))

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 also thought perhaps April had come early. I thought a Kindle Single was just a tongue-in-cheek name for a book.