While they were announced in 2010, I only recently paid attention to Amazon.com’s Kindle Singles (featuring journalism, novellas, essays, humor, and short Kindle eBooks), when two of my favorite authors released Singles: Mark Bittman with Bittman’s Kitchen: What I Grill and Why and Susan Orlean’s Animalish. The reviews of those books have been mostly good, with people pointing out the obvious limitations of this format. I chalk this up to growing pains, however, and I think in time these will come to represent a new format that is very successful. It is time that the eBook publishing business start pricing books (and magazines) based on the new eBook format, and not on a pricing model based on paper publishing. And it is time that publishers get used to people reading on mobile phones, tablets, eBook readers, big screen monitors, what have you. I would like to see more essays and shorter works made available this way and priced low. I would also like to see really good books published that take advantage of excellent quality monitors (think Art Books).
Here’s hoping this is the start of a big, good, new wave of publishing. And if the traditional publishing houses can’t manage it, no doubt Amazon and Apple can.
Smart People I Know 