Amazon.com is to start selling electronic downloads of short stories, single chapters of books and even single scenes from novels as part of a new section called Amazon Shorts.

At the moment this looks like being a US-only deal, and each download will cost just 49 cents.

The idea is that readers will be able to sample new authors at very little cost, or buy updates to books they already own or to read alternative endings to favourite stories.

Steve Kessel, Amazon.com's vice president of digital media told Reuters: "We hope that by making short-form literature widely and easily available, Amazon.com can help to fuel a revival of this kind of work."

Amazon says no digital rights management software is needed to download the stories. Readers can chose to view and read the short directly on a web page, to download a pdf file, or to have the plain text emailed straight to them. ®