I don’t think so, and neither do a lot of people with new ereading devices in their hands.

Enter author Emma Calin.  She is a novelist and a writer of short stories.

Last week,  Emma released The Chosen, her second short work for sale in the Kindle store.

Here’s my Amazon review of her earlier piece, Sub-Prime.

Emma Calin’s Sub-Prime is a haunting short story about the compromises people make for even an uncertain love. Calin takes a grotesque setting and mines beautiful diamonds from it. I would love to see Calin apply her formidable literary gifts to a full length novel that uses this story as its centerpiece.

It only takes twenty minutes or so to read the entire piece. I guarantee the reader will find the time spent on this story well-worth the effort.

Highly recommended.

Now for the new one, The Chosen.

Here’s the review:

The Chosen is the second of Emma Calin’s short stories I have read. Both are jewels that come at life from the underside of the leaf. They are stories of ordinary, common people who hold to their dreams and reach for things beyond their grasp.

The Chosen is a story about unquenchable hope, ill-founded on a love sure to go bad. It is about hare-brained schemes, not thought-through, sure to fail.

The first sentence sums it up: “Of course, there had to be a woman in the story.”

Of course.

I also enjoyed Oscar Sparrow’s narration of the free audio version of the story available to purchasers of the book.

Highly recommended.

Last week, Emma commented on my blog about novels, novellas, short stories and Kindle Singles.  Here is how she sees the current landscape for short form fiction.

My belief is that 5,000 words is too long, particularly if you are adding audio. Attention spans are short and a truly short story truly is a story and no more. I find that 1500 – 2,000 word stories sell at 99cents and that the audio is the factor. TV commercial makers know about true shorts and I think writers have to use the whole width of the road these days. I have just released “The Chosen” as a short with audio and I’ll let you know how it sells. The i Tunes experience should show everyone that the short “single” at a low price is still a winner.

I hope Emma has found the winning formula that will introduce her writing to a large audience.

Who knows? Maybe the next stage for ebooks is the iTunes experience revisited.