(2010-10-12) Kindle Thin Books

Amazon will be promoting a Thin Book format for the Kindle. The company describes these as texts that might be 10,000 to 30,000 words long. That would be roughly 30 to 90 pages of a printed book. Amazon said in a press release that Kindle Single-s could be “twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book,” and would be priced much less than standard books. Also has a Self Publishing spin, since this size is so hard to get published as Printed Book.

Robin Sloan expects this category to have its own Best Seller list.

Boy I hate people publishing to a closed single-vendor platform like this.

Update: hmm, I recall that in Amazon's self-publishing models, they typically allow the author to decide whether to use DRM or not. I'll be more tolerant of DRM-free titles, since I can convert them to EPub. I Commented on the Ted Book post to ask about their titles.

I'd try an experiment, but none of the titles interest me enough.