Given my obsession with the short story form and my irrationally conflicted emotions for all things eBookish, I’m a bit ashamed that I did not notice this story until yesterday afternoon:
Starting on Monday, Amazon will sell two stories, one by Christopher Buckley and the other by Edna O’Brien, through its Kindle store. The stories have been selected and edited by the staff at The Atlantic, the venerable magazine that once published short fiction in its print pages monthly.
Priced at $3.99 each, the stories, which will bear the Atlantic logo, are exclusively available on the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reader, and will not appear in the print version of the magazine. The Atlantic’s editors plan to offer about two Kindle stories every month.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Authors who take this approach must resign themselves to the fact that their works will only be available to those folks who own Kindles (or iPhones). But as one of the authors quoted in the Times’ story points out, short story writers are used to having their work appear in small academic journals, where “it would have had ‘limited distribution anyway.’”
The Atlantic and Kindle appear to have found an imaginative way of reaching the “short story” niche market. Four bucks seems like both a stomachable amount for the readers and enough for The Atlantic to bring in the revenue required to make it work. I’ll be curious to see what sort of response this generates.