Well, to be fair to the writer, he is focusing on the nonfiction side.
Quote:
The great hidden virtue of e-books—hidden beneath the chatter about their effect on the bottom line—is that they allow stories to be exactly as long as we want them to be. It turns out that many of them work best between 10,000 and 35,000 words long—the makings of a whole new nonfiction genre occupying the virgin territory between articles and hardcovers. It may even be the case that Americans can tolerate serious policy work by academics (like economist Cowen’s e-book hit The Great Stagnation) so long as it isn’t padded out to 500 pages.
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He is right in that long form nonfiction articles above magazine length and below book length could not be sold by themselves. They either had to be padded out into books or excerpted in magazines. Now they can be done as ebooks.