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.

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. ®

Related stories

• In brief Amazon.co.uk falls off the web (31 October 2005)
• Amazon pays $40m in patent settlement (12 August 2005)
• Analysis Oz legit downloads fail, and fail again (8 August 2005)
• Amazon delivers shipshape Q2 (26 July 2005)