By Moe Zilla The New York Times ran a fascinating profile of David Blum, the editor of Amazon’s “Kindle Singles” store. But along the way, they also took a look at the whole phenomenon of Singles—and what it means for the future of books. Amazon has sold nearly 5 million Kindle singles over the last 27 months, according to the article about Blum, who tells the newspaper that “Every day I become more obsessed with how brilliant the concept is…” But it’s got me wondering just how popular the Kindle Singles really are… Blum tells the newspaper he’s now receiving more than 1,000 unsolicited manuscripts each month,...

Here's the problem with publishers' book discovery problem (Paid Content) Why Stephen King was wrong to publish 'Guns' as a Kindle Single (NY Daily News) Amazon to Investigate Claims of Worker Intimidation at German Centers (New York  Times) Publishing is tough these days — unless you're in nautical almanacs, apparently (The Guardian) Kindle Daily Deals: 'Beautiful Creatures' books for $2.99 (and 3 others)  ...

Back in March, the Digital Digest profiled Princeton Shorts, a new short-form e-book program launched last fall by Princeton University Press. At least two more AAUP presses have launched short e-book programs this spring: Stanford, with Stanford Briefs, and North Carolina, with UNC Press E-Book Shorts. The basic idea of short-form digital is not original to university presses. Anticipating the evolving desires of e-readership, Amazon launched its Kindle Singles format in January 2011, canvassing for medium-length (5,000-30,000) word pieces ("longer than a magazine article, shorter than a book.") Publishers Weekly reports that they are selling just fine, with the top two or three Singles consistently ranking among...

By Arnold Zafra | for the Technology Tell network Along with the new products it launched yestertoday, Amazon also introduced some new features on its devices related to content consumption. These new features are X-Ray for Movies, Immersion Reading, Kindle Serials and Whispersync for Voice. Let’s take a look at each one of these new features: X-Ray for Movies X-Ray for Movies is a new feature made possible through collaboration with IMDb. According to Amazon, it revolutionizes the movie experience by bringing the power of IMDb directly to movies on the Kindle Fire HD. It allows users to look up any actor in...

On his blog, writer Stephen Woodfin has written discussing using the Amazon Kindle Singles program for publishing shorter works. We’ve mentioned this program before, but Woodfin notes that the program has now established submission guidelines. I’m not sure whether those guidelines were actually added recently or have been around for a while, but this is the first time I’ve seen them pointed out at least. I had thought that the Kindle Singles program had not been open to the general public, but now it seems anyone can submit. The Kindle Singles program is not actually a self-publishing...

  Everyone who lives outside US knows this devil feature of Kindle Store – a mysterious international fee. It usually ranges from $2 to $4, and it’s not proportional to the price of the book. It doesn’t hurt that much when you buy a book which costs, let’s say $12.99. But if you want to get the cheap one, be prepared to pay twice as much as in the US. For instance, you have to pay $3.44 in Poland, if you want to buy one of the 99-cent self-published books. Luckily, there are certain books for which you won’t pay international fee. First...

On FutureBook, Robin Harvie of publisher Aurum Press has a brief post talking about “how things got better for e-book only publishing.” He’s discussing a 26,000-word e-book publication, Things Can Only Get Bitter: The Lost Generation of 1992, about the watershed 1992 Tory victory in UK elections, of which this month year marks the 20th anniversary: It may be a coincidence, but in the same week that it was announced that Century had bought 50 Shades of Grey, the surprise worldwide eBook hit, the emails started landing in our Camden office. The New Statesman agreed to...

Journalism.co.uk has an article discussing how newspapers and magazines are finding that they can mine their existing catalog of material to produce longer-form works they can sell as e-books. One in six Londoners are estimated to own an e-reader of some kind, and a number of UK and other publications are taking advantage of this. Catalonian paper La Vanguardia has published 100 e-book titles since November, 2011—mostly fiction. UK newspaper The Guardian has published 20 e-books since August 2011 under the Guardian Shorts brand. Hearst Magazines’s Cosmopolitan has released a number of e-books as well. ...

One of two absolute MUST READ pieces on PaidContent today about Amazon’s Kindle Singles program. A complete coup for Laura Hazard Owen and the rest of the crew over there. The pieces are filled with gold of which the below is only a small amount: When I got my first royalty check from Amazon, I went to my boss at the bar and was like, “Mike, I quit, dude,” and he was like why, and I was like “Look at this check, man,” and he said, “I’d quit too.” This is what I’m doing now. My three stories that are out have now sold in excess...

Amazon may be stirring up controversy for its actions against independent bookstores (or other brick-and-mortar e-tailers), but at the same time it is creating new opportunities for authors. That’s the focus of a post by Mathew Ingram on GigaOm, in which he profiles a few journalists who have seen a remarkable degree of success with their Kindle Singles—e-books which could not have been easily published in print form. Journalist Marc Herman’s Kindle Single on the aftermath of the Libyan revolution sold enough copies at $1.99 each to begin to recoup costs for the trip to Libya in the first...

The Los Angeles Times has joined the ranks of newspapers and magazines that have begun publishing expanded versions of popular articles as e-books. Today it released a 99-cent Kindle, Nook, and iBooks e-book called A Nightmare Made Real. The book recounts the story of Las Vegas banker Louis Gonzalez III who was accused of kidnapping and raping the mother of his child, and the investigation his defense attorney and an investigator mounted to clear his name. It incorporates material from a two-part Los Angeles Times article, as well as expanded profiles of the people involved. It’s...

Sam Harris has posted a rather provocative entry to his blog discussing the problem faced by writers in an era when audiences “increasingly expect digital content to be free” and have such short attention spans that increasingly full-length books are seeming just too long. It’s a topsy-turvy world, Harris posits, when people with popular blogs get so many hits that publishing it in even a famous and well-regarded magazine like Vanity Fair is “tantamount to burying their work” by comparison. He cites as example an article by his friend Christopher Hitchens, whose numbers of Facebook likes and Twitter...