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Is Amazon short-selling modern lit?

Jon Skillings Editorial director
Jon Skillings is an editorial director at CNET, where he's worked since 2000. A born browser of dictionaries, he honed his language skills as a US Army linguist (Polish and German) before diving into editing for tech publications -- including at PC Week and the IDG News Service -- back when the web was just getting under way, and even a little before. For CNET, he's written on topics from GPS, AI and 5G to James Bond, aircraft, astronauts, brass instruments and music streaming services.
Expertise AI, tech, language, grammar, writing, editing Credentials
  • 30 years experience at tech and consumer publications, print and online. Five years in the US Army as a translator (German and Polish).
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Jon Skillings
2 min read

The company that turned the Internet into the world's largest bookstore is providing a new forum for that perennial literary also-ran, the short story.

In a world dominated by blockbuster novels such as "The Da Vinci Code" and higher-brow long works from "The Kite Runner" to "The Line of Beauty," short stories typically receive short shrift. Fans of the diminutive form have to subscribe to The New Yorker or literary journals, and writers who focus on the form generally must content themselves with a love of their art.

Enter Amazon. On Friday, the e-commerce giant unveiled Amazon Shorts, saying it hopes the digital-only outlet "can help to fuel a revival of this kind of work." At the very least, the online bookshelf will provide flanking support for the English teachers of the world and their well-worn volumes of Hawthorne and Hemingway.

For the connoisseur of literary forms, Amazon offers a range of short forms--"the novella, for instance, or the novelette, or its even more diminutive cousin, the novelini," according to Daniel Wallace, author of the novel "Big Fish" (whence the Ewan McGregor-Tim Burton film) and the lead literary voice in Amazon's press release. The emphasis seems to be on fiction, but essays and other nonfiction are available as well. Regardless of the page count, the items are priced at 49 cents apiece.

Besides Wallace, authors whose concise works will be available via the Shorts service include Robin Cook, James Lee Burke, Danielle Steel and Anne Beattie.

Amazon is quick to point out that no digital rights management software is needed for downloading and reading the stories and essays. Customers can partake of the works via Web site, PDF and e-mail, and may also print them out.