These two new ventures join a market where Amazon (s amzn) is already publishing what it calls “Singles,” or short book-length publications that virtually anyone can produce. To take just one example, blogger and Hunch.com founder Chris Dixon recently bundled all his blog posts about venture capital (he’s also an active angel investor) and published them as an Amazon e-book. Journalism professor Jay Rosen mused on Twitter about doing the same thing with his blog posts about the future of media. And the list of publishers grows every day, with the TED conference launching its own e-book imprint recently, and marketing maven Seth Godin starting a new micro-publishing venture (backed by Amazon) called Domino.
Meanwhile, some authors are making millions by self-publishing multiple inexpensive e-books: Amanda Hocking became famous in the industry over the past six months for making over $2 million by self-publishing a dozen fiction books for younger readers, and recently signed a hefty contract with an existing publisher based on that success. Others have gone in the opposite direction; author Barry Eisler, after publishing a number of books through the traditional route, said recently he’s going to start self-publishing, because he will have more control over the process and will keep more of the revenue.
After centuries of not changing very much at all, the book industry is going through the same kind of upheaval as newspapers, Hollywood and the music business are — and that means more uncertainty, but also more opportunity
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