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Amazon Expands Kindle Singles with Longform Interviews

410G-ZezlVL._SY160_[1]Amazon took another step into publishing today with the launch of Kindle Singles Interview.

This new publishing imprint is designed to take full advantage of the possibilities of digital content by "offering major long-form interviews with iconic figures and world leaders".  Unlike interviews in magazines and news papers, these interviews won’t be trimmed to fit the space available . Instead they will be as long as needed.

The debut Kindle Singles Interview features Shimon Peres, the 89-year-old President of Israel. The interview was conducted by David Samuels, in association with Tablet Magazine. That interview, The Optimist, costs $.99 and like most Kindle Singles it is exclusively available via the Kindle Store.

Kindle Singles is a special section of the Kindle Store which Amazon launched in early 2011. In its early days it was a stealth publishing imprint (as I would call it) which focused on "compelling ideas expressed at their natural length", though that may no longer be the case now that a quarter of the Kindle Single Store is now fiction.

In late 2012 Amazon expanded the Kindle Single Store to the UK and earlier this month Amazon expanded a second time, launching a new Kindle Singles Store in Germany. Amazon currently offers 400 Kindle Singles, all priced between $.99 and $2.99.

Kindle Singles

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Comments


David Haywood Young July 25, 2013 um 11:41 am

Exclusively "available" on Amazon for the term of copyright, which currently means the author/interviewer’s lifetime plus 70 years in the US (all hail Walt Disney). With no guarantee it’ll actually remain available, if Amazon decides to pull it. Either way, you don’t get to change your mind.

Someday I’ll shut up about that. But not today.

fjtorres July 25, 2013 um 12:55 pm

Those are the current terms that *publishers* are contracting.
If you want better terms, go indie.

David Haywood Young July 25, 2013 um 1:39 pm

Not quite, for at least two reasons: (1) as long as there’s a clause to allow rights reversion…no matter the specifics of the contract as far as "out of print" goes, it can’t be worse than this. And (2) then there’s the point that another *publisher* is not likely to restrict your books to a single *retailer* for the term of copyright.

As far as going indie goes, though…I did.

fjtorres July 25, 2013 um 6:08 pm

There you go.
Live and let die. 🙂

Amazon Publishing is just another traditional publisher, after all; they play by the rules of trad pub whether it be Kindle Worlds or Kindle Singles or their pbook imprints. The latter even have offices in a Manhattan glass tower.

As long as they don’t play by *Author Solutions* rules and make you pay for the privilege of being exploited…
(shrug)


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