Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
I like songs being available individually, because one knows whether one likes a song very quickly, and one might well want to have the ability to listen to it again and again.
But short stories are a different matter. I HATE buying individual short stories. I MUCH prefer to buy them bundled into a magazine or anthology. It take far too much time to identify interesting fiction to spend it selecting twelve short stories rather than one book of short stories.
Fictionwise has been selling individual short stories for ages. I hate them.
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I love them; I've bought dozens. As money allows, I've been filling in my collection of Darkover stories and pondering whether whoever owns MZB's copyrights would be willing to release the novels as multiformats if they had good digital copies of them.
I do think they should be *clearly marked* as stories, not novels. And a good bookstore would get together with some skilled editor-people and make collections of short stories. They could create digital anthologies that can hit a much broader market than physical ones: buy them bundled to get a discount or selectively at full price. Potentially even, buy them bundled into a single ebook, to avoid the problem of cluttering one's ebook reader listings with a dozen "ebooks" that are 15kb each.