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Kindle Books in Snack Sizes
February 8, 2010 - 5:48pm — Bibliofuture
Technorati Tags: Ebooks
There has been discussion about adding video, color pictures, links, and other extras to ebooks to raise the price.
Here is the flip side of that idea:
FT Press is selling stripped-down, 1,000- to 2,000-word versions of books, for $1.99, and a new series of essays of about 5,000 words, for $2.99.
Technorati Tags: Ebooks
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Comments
E-articles
That's what these are, of course. 5,000 words is a full-length article (6-8 pages in a typical magazine, maybe less), 1,000-2,000 words is a short article (most columns are around 800 words).
Calling something an ebook doesn't make it a book. And, you know, I don't see paying $3 for an article (or $2 for a short article) unless it's one hell of an article...
Articles
From reading the NYT article it sounds like they are synthesizing nonfiction books. I have read many reviews on Amazon on nonfiction books where the critique was that the book would have made a great article but was thin as a book. If you can get the significant points out of a business book, for example, for $2.99 why pay $14.99 for the book?
Not really my point
Oh, I suspect that most business books--or at least many of them--can be boiled down to 1,000 words, or even to a sentence or two. (Of some of the best-known of the few I've "read," just eliminating repetition would bring them down to pamphlet size.) That's why SkyMall shows not one but two annual-subscription services that send you the gist of X number of business books each month, in bite-size form.
I'm just saying that an article isn't a book--that these aren't ebooks, they're e-articles. But it's also clear that, pre-Kindle, sales #s for "ebooks" included lots and lots of short stories sold by the piece, so this is nothing new.
a good observation
That's an important distinction Walt. Books are something special, I worry about how their intrinsic value might be diminished somewhat by the whole e-book phenomenon.
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