As the amount of content continues to grow (with some content becoming exclusive to a certain format or publication) and venues for all content continue to expand, are information professionals prepared to catalog the material and all its versions and formats? Most likely the answer is yes, But, will we provide access through a catalog record with instructions on how the library user can purchase it on their own? How much can one library purchase and does ILL for electronic content make sense? Is it legal? Is it worth the effort and money?
Let the iTunes-ization of short fiction begin.
Starting on Monday, Amazon will sell two stories, one by Christopher Buckley and the other by Edna O’Brien, through its Kindle store. The stories have been selected and edited by the staff at The Atlantic, the venerable magazine that once published short fiction in its print pages monthly.
Priced at $3.99 each, the stories, which will bear the Atlantic logo, are exclusively available on the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reader, and will not appear in the print version of the magazine. The Atlantic’s editors plan to offer about two Kindle stories every month.
Scott Stossel, deputy editor of The Atlantic, said the new arrangement would allow the magazine to offer more stories than it can in its annual fiction issue, and to make a little extra money. The magazine, founded in 1857, stopped publishing monthly fiction in 2005.
Mr. Stossel said the new Kindle format would allow writers to experiment with work that was either too long for a magazine or too short for a traditional book. In the age of the Kindle, Mr. Stossel said, “you can do publishing that’s not constrained by the limitations and costs of the printed page.”
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