Kindle Singles

Virginia Heffernan in her swansong for the New York Times Sunday Magazine this week touts a new home for long form journalism--Kindle Singles.  Amazon is making longer narrative nonfiction pieces available on its Kindle eReader and platform for prices ranging from free--for a few teaser pieces--to $3, with many priced at an impulse price of 99 cents. Articles include titles such as "Beware Dangerism!" by Gever Tulley which argues for not being overly-protective of your kids and "Reboot-enanny" by Rebecca Huval which describes the modern Greenwich Village folk scene. Heffernan rhapsodizes: "with Kindle Singles, Amazon has gone white knight on us. In one fell swoop, it has figured out a way to shut out virtually every entity that mediates between journalists and readers: traditional publishers, printers, warehousers, advertisers and the World Wide Web." 
But Heffernan's piece is even more interesting for the parting swipe she takes at the Web. Part of the reason she welcomes the Kindle Singles program is because its not Web based.  "I never thought I’d back off the Web," she writes, "but I have. The once-glorious freedom of the Web was not free. Its price is a bone-deep commercialism that cannot yet be circumvented. For convenience, comprehensiveness and social life, I still visit, but now I see these visits as at least as risky and irritating as they are liberating and exhilarating."
By the way, you don't have to have a Kindle to access content in Amazon's Kindle library. You can download the Kindle app for free to iPhones, PCs, Macs and even iPads.