For a bit of time now, Amazon has been trying to herald the move towards electronic books, essentially ushering in a new medium for which books will eventually become the primary method of production. The Kindle, which is not a new story, was supposed to be their attempt to usher in this new era, and so far, it is doing a pretty damn good job of leading the industry. Sure, the iPad is an attempt to steal back some of that thunder, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that right now Amazon is in the driving seat with the capability of calling a lot of future shots.
Which is why I found it shocking that Amazon released the following statement:
Generally speaking, writers have two options when they sit down to create a new piece that can be distributed through conventional channels. They can author a short, attention-grabbing magazine-length feature that doesn’t require the reader to invest more than a few minutes of their time, or they can craft a long, 50,000-plus word novel that is meant to be absorbed over multiple sittings.
Now, if you’ve never been a professional writer before, this may sound quite innocent, and maybe even informative, but if you have any knowledge of the publishing business, and I mean ANY, you know that there are far more than two options an author has when sitting down to write a new piece. Basically, Amazon is stating a writer can choose from a short story or a novel, and now they have somehow managed to invent something in between that.
Writers have been writing all sorts of variations of those two models for centuries. Publishers have been publishing variations of far beyond those two models for centuries as well. Just recently, the whole unmentionable (by me, mainly) epic of Twilight released a novella, which just so happens to be a book that is too small to be a 50,000 normal novel and too big to be a short story. Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? Yes, writers have been tackling this genre long before Amazon came onto the scene.
To me, it appears that Amazon is attempting to somehow create a new category to invent a brand new revenue stream, even though that category has existed long before Amazon became a web site, back in the days when an Amazon was often referred to women I dated who used to beat me up when I didn’t comform to their expectations (but that’s a completely different article, of course). We don’t need this new category, especially when Amazon already charges different prices for different books based on the expectations and demands of the specific publishers.
To indicate they are somehow inventing a brand new length of writing after 4000 years since the first human scribbled some carvings on a cave is somewhat insulting to the rest of us. It’s not like they need special programming to release an e-book that has fewer pages than a “normal” e-book. The whole announcement sounds like a non-announcement to me, but more of an attempt to remain in the news now that everyone and his brother is releasing an e-reader and selling it at Best Buy.
(sources: TMC Net, Amazon’s web site)