And coming soon to a bookstore near everyone:
Amazon is rolling out a separate section of its Kindle store meant for shorter contentmeatier than long-form journalism, but shorter than a typical book. Called "Kindle Singles," the content will be distributed like other Kindle books but will likely fall between 10,000 and 30,000 words, or the equivalent of a few chapters from a novel.
The company believes that some of the best ideas don't need to be stretched to more than 50,000 words in order to get in front of readers, nor do they need to be chopped down to the length of a magazine article.
A novelette idea; or the classic pamphlet, a form begging to be renewed. Yglesias perks up:
[Particulary] in the kind of political/policy space I work in, I think we see a ton of good magazine articles that outline ideas worth expanding on that get turned into books that are really quite a bit longer than they need to be. But conventions about content-lengththe column, the magazine article, the bookare driven by the economics of printing and distributing bundles of ink-covered paper rather than considerations about the content itself.