Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch “Kindle Singles”—Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book.
Love it. Great opportunities here, especially for long-form journalism. With digital text, there’s no need to shoehorn stories into legacy categories. That’s no excuse to eschew editing—a tighter story is always a better one, in ink or pixels—but it does allow for richer pieces: what would have been a stretched-thin book condenses into a powerful long read; a magazine narrative, begging for twice the words, develops fully.
I haven’t read The Accidental Billionaires, but Orson Scott Card did:
Mezrich faced a nearly insurmountable difficulty in writing the story of the founding of Facebook. After all his research, he had about fifty pages worth of story, and that’s not long enough for a book.
But it is long enough for a Single.