Medium: Living Singles

It is entirely right that Amazon, that native Americans e-tailer narrative nonfiction, now sells by masters such as Pete Hamill, Ron Rosenbaum and Mark Greif in an algorithm pricing and programming that Amazon has developed exclusively for it. These are the individual switch, nonfiction novella-length packed as e-book. Sell to head for $ 2 and $ 3. (The book of Kindle a novel-length, on the contrary, goes anywhere between $ 4 and $ 12.) Amazon calls these short-e-Books interesting ideas expressed their natural length.

What a great slogan. So sweetly bulky — a return, as the form itself, at a time when publishers to general interest magazines were not forced to transform regularly featured articles "long captions." In those days, hefty features may be paid for with ads that ran against the lighter fare magazine. What's more, the ads tucked into every nook printable were not necessary because magazines were eager to paying subscribers and newsstand buyers. The market for fiction and nonfiction shrank not because people have gotten dumber or have lost their attention spans; narrative non-fiction, as so many forms of the 20th century, fell on hard times, when the Web came along and readers stopped paying for content.

But now, with individual Kindle, Amazon went White Knight on us. In one fell swoop, has discovered a way to close out virtually every entity that mediates between journalists and readers: traditional publishers, printers, warehousemen, advertisers and the World Wide Web. All that is left is the bookstore — Amazon — which is almost a clinic literacy nonprofit, but at least it's only a transgressor tollkeeping the reader-writer. For readers used for greasing many Palm trees more than Amazon just to get their fix of Word, the introduction of Kindle Singles should come as exciting news. It should also delight readers who care about journalism interweaved and enchanted of the 60s and 70s: Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote.

The Web gives and takes away the Web. For nearly four years, this column — which ends today — he told what has been lost and gained from digitization of practically all the cultural artifacts and experiences. I took a mixed view of the Web open and free. At the beginning, the Web seemed like a cross between a superstore candies and a civilization just discovered on Neptune. Flora culture that they were growing in the nooks and crannies necessary classification Web. What is a YouTube video? What is a Wikipedia entry? What is a tweet? But I had to recognize the widespread concern that the Web reduces the content and perhaps even culture. The Web has been a source of actual disorientation in American publishing, film, music and TV companies.

So I was surprised when a plausible alternative to the Web didn't come from traditional media, which has been addressed to it, but the tech world. When the iPhone first appeared, followed by the Kindle and iPad, it became clear that electronic books and applications provided a way to siphon the Internet resources for individuals, who could now sample that energy without being vulnerable to commercialism of the Web. This was a huge step forward. Who is honest with you know that the Web has ceased to be a great place for consumers of culture, a year or two ago. You think you are reading the Web these days, but you are now reading — collect data on you, trying to sell stuff, go to other links. On the Web, reading is shopping. And sometimes you don't want to store.

Kindle in particular brought me the first moment of peace from the noise of the Web that I'd had in a long time. True, I thought that I loved the Web noise when the only alternative was to leave in analog culture — but I adored the silence that I found on Kindle.

I never thought it would be back on the Web, but I didn't. Freedom of once-glorious Web was not free. Its price is a bone-deep commercialism that still can't be circumvented. For convenience, integrity and social life, yet visit, but now I see these visits as least as risky and irritating as liberating and exhilarating.

But I need more applications and E-Books during my withdrawal from the Web. And so I am thrilled to find these individuals turn on narrative non-fiction, which add to the shapes I can savor here. Narrative non-fiction in our digital era could be hardly any other way — and in fact, seemed once headed for obsolescence. I am extremely happy to see him go.

Thanks for reading.

Points of entry: recommendations this week

SINGLE SHOOTER
In "saving evil: what we lose," Ron Rosenbaum takes aim at the "columnists bien-pensant serious" printing for the refusal to face the fact of evil in human nature. How does Rosenbaum get to shoot from margins? Freedom in technology.

SINGLE MOTHER
The critic Cristina Nehring, author of defence swashbuckling romance mad called "A Vindication of Love," chronicles now another love story — between a mother and infant daughter — in a single turn, "journey to the edge of the light."

SINGLE OCTO
Mark Greif, in single "get wasted and the politics of children," Kindle considers the validity with regard to the Nadya Suleman octuplet-bearing as an icon of recklessness.