Amazon Kindle Singles Now Available: Short and Sweet Reads for the Kindle

Amazon announced that Kindle Singles has now launched, making it easy for readers to find short and focused writing on topics that interest them. The new Kindle Singles will normally be around 5,000 to 30,000 words and provide readers with a, “well researched, well argued and well illustrated,” piece of work that is presented at the best length.

Amazon Kindle Singles will be priced between $.99 and $4.99 and are able to be read on the Kindle and on Kindle apps for various mobile devices and on your Mac or PC.

The first group of Kindle Singles includes the following highlights from Amazon, and a broader selection available in the Amazon Kindle Singles store.

  • “Lifted” by Evan Ratliff (34 pages, $1.99): The thieves had a handpicked crew, a stolen helicopter, a cache of explosives, and a plan to rob a $150 million cash repository. The Stockholm police had a tip-off. Wired and New Yorker writer Evan Ratliff recounts the inside story of an audacious 2009 bank heist, and the race to solve it. This is an inaugural title from publisher The Atavist.
  • “The Happiness Manifesto” by Nic Marks (40 pages, $2.99): Modern research proves the ancient wisdom that “money can’t buy you happiness.” But then why do our governments see their main task as simply growing GDP? Marks, founder of the London-based Centre for Well-Being, sets out an ingenious new way of defining national goals—and in the process reveals five ways people can nurture their own happiness. One of the inaugural TEDBooks.
  • “Piano Demon” by Brendan I. Koerner (37 pages, $1.99): At age six, Teddy Weatherford was working in a Virginia coal mine. Two decades later, he was the jazz king of Asia. Koerner, a Wired contributing editor and author of “Now The Hell Will Start,” tells how a piano legend in a sharkskin suit lived the American Dream by leaving it behind.
  • “Leaving Home” by Jodi Picoult (43 pages, $2.99): The deep pains and powerful pleasures of  parenting: those are the extremes explored here by the extraordinary novelist Jodi Picoult. In three short pieces that display her wide emotional range, Picoult weaves together stories of love and loss with heartbreaking simplicity.
  • “The Dead Women of Juarez” by Robert Andrew Powell (31pages, $ 1.99): It sounded like one of the great murder mysteries of our time: who was killing the women of Juarez? Journalist Robert Andrew Powell went to the Mexican border town to investigate, and separates fact from myth in a saga that eerily echoes the plot of Roberto Bolaño’s epic novel “2666.”
  • “Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks” by Sebastian Rotella/ProPublica (38 pages, $.99): The U.S. investigation of the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai provides a detailed picture of the ties between Pakistan’s intelligence service and a leading militant group. The latest reporting from ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
  • “The $500 Diet” by Ian Ayres (39 pages, $2.99): When Yale law professor Ayres vowed to drop his weight from 205 pounds to 180 pounds, he put his money where his mouth was — literally.  It was either lose the weight, or pay the price. A look into Ayres’ weight-loss method through simple financial incentive.
  • “Darkstar” by Christopher R. Howard (44 pages, $2.99): A pre-apocalyptic love story. Sailor, a homeless Irish teenager who’s haunted by a diabolical voice, seeks to reunite with a soulmate he hasn’t seen since boyhood, as a cosmic event threatens to extinguish life on Earth. Howard’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, and his first novel, “Tea of Ulaanbaatar,” comes out this May.
  • “Homo Evolutis” by Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans (58 pages, $2.99): Enriquez and Gullans–two eminent authors, researchers, and entrepreneurs–explore a world where humans increasingly shape their environment, their own selves, and other species.  They envision a future in which humankind becomes a new species — one which directly and deliberately controls its own evolution and that of many other species. One of the inaugural TEDBooks.
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