Last Thursday the Guardian's Julian Gough predicted that
Amazon's Kindle Singles are going to be the future. Thank dog he also included other publishers' digital copies of fiction and non-fiction texts that allow authors to get work published which doesn't fit any of the traditional formats, i.e. which is too long to count as a short story, too short to be a novel, too long as an essay and too short for a monograph. He proposes to call these texts 'bookeens', little books. I'm not sure that this term will eventually make it, but I leave that for definers of genre to ponder over.
I myself am intrigued by this new format and the texts themselves: are we really going to witness the evolution of new genres, somewhere between the short and the long form for both fiction and non-fiction? Will they be new in any structural sense? Is there really something like a text "at [its] natural length" (Gough) or do Singles simply mean that the sometimes necessary cuts and focussing got lost? To find out, I'll have to read some, I suppose. And that's what I'm planning to do: review Book Singles.
This is a bit of a new departure for me because I've always been (and am
going to stay!) a proper paper book lover, who enjoys nothing more than
leaving train tickets and receipts in books, placing finished volumes
on my shelves, and scribbling in the margins. The Singles are digital
only in their nature, so I suppose I will have to get used to that
first.
I asked for indie publishers on
twitter yesterday that also offer these short texts, but apart from the
Galley Beggar Press with their Singles Club I didn't get any further recommendations other than Amazon (by the way, thanks,
Thom!). So, I'd be really glad to get any more suggestions, preferably from smaller presses, since the whole Amazon malarkey simply bores the sh*t out of me when it comes to publishing.
Thanks in advance for all your suggestions and comments, I hope some of you would like to join me in reading and discussing!
