Here’s a bit of remarkable news that arrived over the weekend: Amazon.com’s Kindle, through The Atlantic, is going to sell short stories. They’re going to start with two stories, one by Christopher Buckley and one by Edna O’Brien, and they’re going to charge readers $3.99 to read the stories. The only place a reader will be able to get these stories will be on the Kindle.
How old-fashioned of them. How 1925. It’s like saying, if you want to read Mr. Thurber’s story, you’ll have to buy that issue of The New Yorker. But in fact, it’s so old-fashioned, it’s radical. You can’t say it’s revolutionary; think of it as counter-revolutionary.
In taking this step, Amazon is making an argument that exclusivity counts for something. We’re going to see if they’re right, but essentially, they’re arguing that they’re going to reward Kindle buyers with access to high quality exclusive content, and they’re going to build a brand by attracting serious readers by offering stuff they won’t be able to get anywhere else. (One wonders if they were tempted to publish Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura. Now that would have been a coup!)
By taking this small step, Amazon is taking a whack at Google, which says that content should be free and that by placing content on the web and making it accessible to all, publishers of newspapers and magazines will be able to earn fabulous sums, or pie in the sky when they die by and by, whichever comes first. But Amazon is telling Rupert Murdoch and The New York Times and every other publisher–and writer–your work is valuable, and people should pay for access to your work, and that when they do, they will be enriched, and rewarded, and will want to repeat the experience. Assuming, that is, that these readers feel that they will be receiving something–quality reporting, quality writing–that they cannot obtain from free sources.
Here’s hoping Amazon is right.