Here are six startups that offer new options to creators. Three of them — Periodical, 29th Street Publishing and Creatavist — let you create and sell mobile-friendly magazines, ebooks and newsletters; the other three — Postach.io, Ghost and Glipho — aim to let you blog in a new way.

All of the companies featured here launched in the past few months (or, in Ghost’s case, will launch later this summer), so they’re still working out some quirks and rolling out new features. What they have in common, though, is that they’re all trying to make writing and publishing easier and better. Check them out and let us know what you think (and which startups we should add to our list).

Periodical: Create and sell digital magazines

What you can do with it: Periodical, which allows users to create and sell publications — magazines, newsletters and so on — for a variety of platforms including Apple’s Newsstand, embraces Craig Mod’s model of subcompact publishing: the idea that digital publishing should be simple and that the works created should be very easy to read on smartphones and tablets. Cofounder Sean Stevens told me that most users of the platform use The Magazine, originally created by Instapaper founder Marco Arment, as a model.

What we like: It’s easy and relatively inexpensive to sell content through your own branded app.

Background and funding: Periodical, which is six months old, is one of the startups in Los Angeles-based incubator Launchpad LA, through which it’s received $100,000 in seed funding. Cofounders David Mancherje, Shahruz Shaukat and Stevens previously worked together at comedy podcast network Earwolf.

Platforms supported: Users create their publication — which can include text, photos and videos — on Periodical’s site, set the price and then publish it on the web or as an iOS app; the platform also supports delivery to Kindle. Android support is coming soon.

Number of users: N/A.

Cost: Free to create a web-only publication; $29/year for Kindle delivery; $99/year to create a custom-branded iOS app (the pricing will be the same for Android). In addition, Periodical takes a cut of a publication’s subscription revenue: 20 percent for subscriptions through the web, Kindle and Android, and 9 percent for subscriptions through Apple’s Newsstand (on top of the 30 percent fee that Apple charges).

Availability: In beta; get on the invite list here.

What’s next: Android support; more discovery features; a marketplace for Periodical titles.

Atavist’s Creatavist: Publish multimedia stories

What you can do with it: Create multimedia stories and publish them as apps, ebooks and for the web.

What we like: You can create a one-time project and push it out to the world. You don’t have to commit to publishing regularly or on a set schedule.

Background and funding: Creatavist, which launched in April, is the software that Atavist originally developed in order to publish its own e-singles. Atavist has raised $1.5 million in its first funding round and an undisclosed amount in a second round from Scott Rudin and Barry Diller’s IAC. (Atavist is providing the technology for Diller and Rudin’s yet-to-launch digital publishing house.)

Platforms supported: Web, iOS. Users can also export their works as ebooks and upload them to digital bookstores like Kindle.

Number of users: N/A, but companies working with Creatavist so far include NPR and corporations like the Four Seasons. Atavist CEO Evan Ratliff told me that a lot of photographers are also using the platform.

Cost: Free to create one story and publish it on the web and in Creatavist’s iOS app; $10 per month to create unlimited stories and publish them on the web and in Creatavist’s iOS app. An option to publish stories through your own branded iOS app and on the web is coming soon, with pricing starting at $250 per month.

Availability: Available now.

What’s next: Within the month, users will be able to sell their works through Creatavist’s app (right now, they can only give them away for free). Atavist will take a cut of the sales; that amount has yet to be determined.

29th Street Publishing: Publish mobile magazines

What you can do with it: Publish and sell web and iOS magazines as individual apps. 29th Street Publishing, like Periodical, embraces the subcompact publishing model.

What we like: 29th Street Publishing isn’t open to everyone, but because the company closely vets the publishers it works with, you know as a reader that you are getting high-quality content. And the vetting process forces publishers to come up with concrete publication plans. 29th Street also provides publishers with a custom-built iOS analytics platform.

Background and funding: The NYC-based 29th Street Publishing was cofounded by former Six Apart employees David Jacobs and Natalie Podrazik. Editorial director Blake Eskin was previously web editor at The New Yorker.

Platforms supported: iOS.

Number of users: 29th Street Publishing chooses which publishers to work with. Among the 12 publications currently available are The Awl’s Weekend Companion, New York Review of Books editor Ann Kjellberg’s Little Star Weekly, and Maura Johnston’s Maura Magazine.

Cost: 29th Street helps develop, design and build magazine apps for free and then takes a revenue share of subscriptions. It also licenses its CMS, app and analytics platform to companies that don’t want to do a revenue share or that want to put out a free magazine (like ProPublica).

Availability: It’s not open to everyone; see above. “For us to work with someone, we want to make sure that their work makes sense for our platform, that they have an audience (or they have a clearly defined potential audience), and that we believe that they are going to make good on their commitment to subscribers,” cofounder and CEO Jacobs told me. “Over time, we’re going to open the platform up much more broadly, but we’re being selective for now as we focus on the product.”

What’s next: Maura Magazine will launch a web version this month, and Android versions of some titles are coming this fall. 29th Street even plans to experiment with print.

Ghost: Open-source, crowdfunded blogging platform

What you’ll be able to do with it: Publish a blog in a simple and elegant, open-source platform that provides more control over content than Tumblr but is simpler than WordPress. “It differentiates from Tumblr in being open source — which means you own your data, and you can control every part of the program (neither of which you can do with Tumblr),” founder John O’Nolan, a former WordPress exec, told me. “It differentiates from WordPress in being for bloggers. WordPress is a big complicated content management system that can power all sorts of websites. Ghost is just for blogs.”

What we like: The platform looks beautiful and has a one-stop dashboard that combines your blog’s traffic and performance data in one place.

Background and funding: Founded by former WordPress exec John O’Nolan, Ghost raised £196,362 (USD $298,627) in a successful Kickstarter campaign this spring (far beyond its £25,000 goal). Ghost will operate as a nonprofit software foundation.

Platforms supported: Web; responsive design will work on all devices.

Number of users: Ghost hasn’t launched yet, but 5,236 people backed its Kickstarter campaign.

Cost: Free; a paid hosted service will be available later this year.

Availability: Ghost should be available by the end of the summer.

Postach.io: Blog via Evernote

What you can do with it: Publish notes created in Evernote to a personal blog. “People who use Evernote are very passionate about Evernote,” cofounder Shawn Adrian told me, noting that the company’s seen a bunch of users switch over from Tumblr.

What we like: The fact that you can make a “curated” blog with all types of content — recipes, articles and so on — that you’ve saved to Evernote.

Background and funding: Two-month-old Postach.io is based in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Cofounders Shawn Adrian and Gavin Vickery previously built QuoteRobot, which is proposal and invoice-creating software for web designers, and Adrian describes that as their “bread and butter app.” They’ve received $200,000 in funding from Vancouver’s Full Stack Ventures. Evernote reached out after seeing Postach.io on Hacker News, and it’s a contestant in the 2013 Evernote Devcup.

Platforms supported: Web. Users tag notes for Postach.io — which can include text, audio, video, images and links, as well as Evernote Food posts and web clips — in Evernote and they’re automatically published to a blog. Users can also import their Tumblr to their Postach.io blog.

Number of users: 3,500.

Cost: Free, with a premium version planned.

Availability: In beta, available to anyone.

What’s next: Tighter integration with Evernote, pro themes, more sharing and discovery features, a premium version. Adrian said that the company is also talking with Evernote about referral fees when Postach.io users upgrade to Evernote Premium.

Glipho: Blog with built-in social features

What you can do with it: Create a blog, then publicize that blog through Glipho’s built-in social network. Users rank and highlight content, some of which is spotlighted on Glipho’s homepage. SEO tools are built in, and users can follow writers and topics they’re interested in.

What we like: The curation and recommendations provide a service for readers as well as writers.

Background and funding: The London-based Glipho launched its public beta in March and has 6 employees in the U.K. and one in the U.S.; it’s hiring three more employees in the U.S. to open a Boston-based office. Founder and CEO Roger Planes previously developed software and websites for journalists. The company has raised $750,000 in a seed round.

Platforms supported: Web; import existing blogs from Tumblr, WordPress and Blogger. Glipho has an Android app and is awaiting approval from Apple on an iOS app.

Number of users: N/A, but Glipho says it has users from 120 different countries who have published or imported over 150,000 blog posts.

Cost: Free.

Availability: Available now.

What’s next: Mobile app improvements and release of Glipho’s API.

The new “Explore” section of Readmill’s app lets users download free ebooks from directly within the app. For now, a lot of those books are in the public domain, but Readmill is also working with publishers and independent bookstores to run limited-time promotions through the “Explore” section. At launch, Emily Books, The Atavist, The Pragmatic Bookshelf, Five Simple Steps, Rosenfeld Media and a few others are giving away ebooks through Readmill’s app.

In addition, Readmill has partnered with The Guardian, The Atavaist and Livrada. The Guardian and Atavist are using Readmill’s technology to enable direct sales through their websites; once a user has bought a Guardian Short or Atavist e-single, he or she can use the “Send to Readmill” button to read it from Readmill’s app. And Livrada, which enables users and organizations to gift ebooks, will use “Send to Readmill” for delivery of EPUB files.

The Berlin-based Readmill is growing fast. Over 75 independent publishers and retailers, reaching a million readers, have now enabled the “Send to Readmill” button on their sites, up from 22 in February. “We’re adding new partners almost every week,” CEO Henrik Berggren told me. “We started out trying to convince everyone it was valuable. Now we’re basically only handling inbound requests.”

Moving forward, Berggren said that Readmill wants to expand beyond iOS to more platforms, and also wants to support more types of ebook files (right now, it only works with EPUB and PDF). The company’s launch of support for Adobe DRM last October means users can now read books from Kobo, Nook and Google Play through Readmill, but Kindle books still aren’t supported. “It’s very important that we support as many formats as possible to make it easier for the readers,” Berggren told me. “You should be able to open any file.”

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

As Starkman notes in his column, the fact that longer stories have declined at newspapers like the L.A. Times shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Tribune Co., the owner of the Times, filed for bankruptcy several years ago and the chain has been struggling ever since (the Los Angeles paper and many of the company’s other assets are said to be for sale). The Washington Post, where CJR says longform stories were down by about 50 percent from 2003, and the New York Times — down by 25 percent, according to Starkman — have also been suffering from an industry-wide dropoff in ad revenue.

More resources on fewer stories isn’t necessarily bad

In that context, publishing fewer long stories seems like a fairly natural response to a shortage of income, and a need to print fewer pages on expensive newsprint. It’s also worth noting that the cash-strapped New York Times has actually published more stories that are 3,000 words and longer than it did in 2003 — 32 percent more, according to the CJR’s numbers. And the newspaper got some well-deserved acclaim for the way it handled the online version of one of those stories: namely, the Snowfall feature it released as an online series and an e-book late last year.

The Times‘ Snowfall feature helps to make one point that Starkman’s bleak assessment of the industry avoids, and that is the fact that longform journalism is evolving away from the traditional newspaper-based publishing that his numbers focus on. As the spokesman for the L.A. Times noted in a response to CJR, much of the paper’s feature coverage now includes video, graphics and other elements that wouldn’t have been present a decade ago — and don’t show up in a raw word count.

“In recent years, our longform storytelling has also typically incorporated unique videos and photo galleries. The two media – print and pixels – are seamlessly integrated in a way that a Factiva search can’t capture.”

As journalism professor Jeff Jarvis pointed out in a response to Starkman’s original post on Twitter, simple length is not a determinant of overall quality in newspaper features (and to be fair, the CJR writer admits as much in the first few paragraphs of his piece). In many cases, those longer features that were published a decade ago may have been overly generous — or indulged in only because they make good “award bait,” as one former newspaper colleague of mine described them.

Papers aren’t the only source of longform journalism

If newspapers like the Post, the Times and the Wall Street Journal are being more judicious with their use of space, and trying to devote the time and resources to fewer long pieces that provide more value, that’s arguably a good thing. And Starkman’s diagnosis also focuses (not surprisingly perhaps) on newspapers in a vacuum — essentially ignoring all of the innovation that is occurring in longform journalism outside that industry, through services like Byliner, Longreads and Atavist.

The magazine-style features that Byliner has become known for, or the longform pieces that readers share through Longreads may not replace the missing newspaper features one-for-one, but they are clearly filling a need. That need also becomes obvious when you look at some of the most-saved articles at “read it later” services like Pocket — many of them are long features from magazines and other outlets (although whether those who save such pieces ever get around to reading them is another question).

In other words, newspapers are playing on a much broader field than they used to. And all that competition makes it even more important that they focus their time and energy on features that can really come alive online, the way Snowfall did for the NYT — and if that means fewer words in fewer pieces, then perhaps that is for the best.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Jan Arief Purwanto, as well as the Columbia Journalism Review and Shutterstock / Ruggiero Scardigno

Internet curmudgeon Nick Carr attacked this particular question in a recent post on his blog, and got into an interesting debate with digital-media theorist Clay Shirky via the comments. Ironically, while Shirky is often criticized as a purveyor of wishful thinking about media, it is Carr who argues there is something ineffable and mysterious about the format we know as the book, while Shirky’s argument seems more based in reality

(Note: we are going to be discussing the future of the book and potential business models for book-related content at our paidContent media conference in New York on April 18, with a panel discussion featuring Atavist founder Evan Ratliff and Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks).

In his original essay — entitled “Will Gutenberg laugh last?” — Carr notes that research shows e-book reading is still on the rise, but also shows that print reading continues to command a large share of the market, and that printed book sales are “holding up relatively well.” Some publishers and distributors have even noticed a slowdown in e-book sales, says Carr, who then goes on to propose some reasons why that might be the case, including:

“We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction)… the e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been.”

Shirky says even e-books themselves are transitional

Among those who showed up to comment on Carr’s piece was Shirky, who argues that it is more likely the book format itself is simply going to die out as a result of the web and other developments — and not just the printed book, but the whole concept of a book, which he describes as nothing more than a “production unit” for content, like the album was for music.

As Shirky puts it:

“Maybe books won’t survive the transition to digital devices, any more than scrolls survived the transition to movable type… what the internet portends is not the end of the paper container of the book, but rather the way paper organized our assumptions about writing altogether.”

In a comment of his own, Carr responds that whatever might happen to reference works like encyclopedias or phone books — which he agrees would make more sense in digital form — books that consist of an “extended narrative, either fictional or factual and almost always shaped by a single authorial consciousness and expressed in a single authorial voice” would always remain, even if it is in digital form, because there is more to it than just being a convenient container for content.

“Your desire to see cultural artifacts as mere technological artifacts, as “production units,” leads you to jump to the conclusion that because the narrative art of the book is resistant to digital re-formation, the narrative art is doomed to obsolescence.”

In a follow-up comment, Shirky maintains that the novel — fictional or not — is a content model that is “pretty decisively wrapped up in the affordances and limitations of print,” from their length to the idea that all of the content has to be delivered at the same time and for a single price. He argues that given the “native grain of the internet,” those features would not be transferrable to an online environment in the long term. In other words, e-books themselves might be just an interim step towards something else.

“If I’m right about this, the fate of the printed book will have less to do with competition from ebooks (at least in their ‘digital copy of print’ versions) than from competition with Longreads and New Inquiry for the time and attention of the reader of extended narratives.”

Will books follow the epic poem into oblivion?

This doesn’t sit well with Carr, however, who responds with a comment that (among other things) accuses Shirky of having an almost nihilistic approach to cultural artefacts like books, and of failing to see that in some cases having a new product or platform replace an old one might be a loss for humanity rather than a gain:

“I’m certainly not suggesting that uniquely valuable forms of media, or the modes of thinking or expression that they promote, are immune to destruction or alteration by historical forces, particularly ones driven by utilitarian concerns. But if such a medium is lost or diminished by technological or economic change, we shouldn’t simply say ‘who cares; other shit will come along.’”

In a response to an email from Wired magazine founder and author Kevin Kelly on the subject, Carr gives some examples of valuable forms of media that he believes have been lost or diminished: namely, “the oral epic poem, the symphony, the silent film with live musician accompaniment, the dramatic play, the short-form cartoon, the map [and] the LP.” And he argues that the book, the movie and the video game could also fall into this category.

In the end, Carr’s argument comes down to a belief that old forms of expression like the traditional book are better than anything that might have come along to displace them from their position of dominance in our culture — and his belief forms part of the argument in his book The Shallows, which argues that digital media is actually changing the way we think, and in general making us more stupid (a view I have argued against).

Are we seeing the rise of new artistic forms that will be as beneficial to humanity as the epic poem was, or the symphony, or the silent film? I think we are, and Clay Shirky seems to as well, but Carr clearly disagrees. Who is right won’t be known for some time, if ever.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Marcus Hansson, retro writer and Frederic della Faile

For BuzzFeed, best know for viral fluff like “50 photos of cat heaven,” the new story is its most ambitious plunge yet into the rarified world of New Yorker or Atlantic-style essays. At a deeper level, BuzzFeed’s initiatives will test whether digital upstarts can replace the literary pleasure and cultural power of established print titles.

Turning to the story itself, ”Atari Teenage Riot: The inside story of Pong and the video game industry’s big bang” is a spry, deeply researched account of how a group of maverick computer types installed Pong games in TV sets and placed them in bars around San Francisco. The gaming pioneers earned millions in quarters and gave video games a permanent place in America’s cultural landscape.

The story is a good read but is more remarkable for the way it’s presented: in white on black letters and with vibrant pictures and animation that conjure up the era of Pong. It looks like this (in the story, the image is animated):

The Pong tale is not the site’s first long-form story, but it is the deepest that BuzzFeed has reached into its technical bag of tricks. The result is a new and distinct form of storytelling that strives to offer up the same depth and beauty of print magazines. It’s unclear, though, if BuzzFeed can also match the output of those publications.

“We are not a ‘GIF of the day’ or ‘one longform story per week’ kind of place, so it’s impossible to really set expectations on quantity here. We’re very much focused on the quality,” said Executive Editor Doree Shafrir, a former Rolling Stone editor who is one of several high profile hires BuzzFeed brought in this year.

Despite the lofty goals, there are still two wild cards here. One is whether BuzzFeed (or anyone else) can duplicate the aesthetic escapism of a print magazine; the Pong story, which I read on both a tablet and computer, was smart and the layout was beautiful, but it didn’t feel as relaxing as reading the New Yorker on the couch.

Second, there is the business question. It’s terrific news that BuzzFeed’s ambitions stretch beyond cats and OMG, but can they pay for them? After all, the state of online advertising means BuzzFeed can’t (for now, at least) fund its essays with high-priced Tiffany’s or Cartier spreads. At the same time, the site may be hard-pressed to apply its “native advertising” approach to long-form stories.

In the bigger picture, BuzzFeed is one of several disruptive publishers helping to define what long form will look like in the digital age. Others include The Verge and Gawker which are likewise offering free, quality essays. Meanwhile, platforms like Byliner and Atavist are providing new ways for authors to charge for long-form content. For now, it’s too soon to say if these companies will come to displace the New Yorker as a new form of magazine — or if, instead, there will be room for all to flourish.

(Image by alphaspirit via Shutterstock)

According to the press release, “Brightline plans to publish original short and long form literary fiction and nonfiction, with its first titles expected to be released in mid 2013.” Atavist, which publishes e-singles in addition to licensing its technology platform, will also continue to publish independently.

Atavist is handling the technology but is also a large part of the venture — the ebooks will be published under the Atavist brand. (It’s unclear how print books will be handled or where they’ll be sold.) This summer, according to the New York Times, “Mr. Diller and Mr. Rudin discussed paying as much as $10 million for a controlling interest in Atavist. A partnership grew out of those discussions.” Through that partnership, “Atavist and Brightline will exchange an undetermined amount of minority equity interests in each other’s ventures, and IAC will provide $20 million in capital to build out Brightline as a publisher in addition to making investments in Atavist.”

“Publishing will change more in the next ten years than it has in the last hundred…” Diller said in a statement. “We have the resources and they have the ability, using Atavist’s technology and digital smarts, to play a continuing and significant role in that transformation.”

It’s unclear what kinds of authors Brightline is looking to sign up, though the NYT says it “will pay big advances to compete for big-name authors.” It’s also unclear if the ebooks will be available only through The Atavist’s website and apps or through other retailers like Amazon as well. And since The Atavist does not publish print books, it is unclear how and when those will be available. However, in both the press release and the NYT article, one thing seems clear: Barry Diller is willing to spend a lot of money on the venture.

Photo courtesy of Flickr / Jeff Howard

What’s new this time around is that Amazon is using a pay-once model: A user who buys the first installment in a serial automatically gets all of the others for free. Serials are being run out of Amazon’s West Coast publishing division – along with its imprints like Thomas & Mercer and 47North – while Kindle Singles are based on the East Coast.

Amazon has eight Kindle Serials for sale so far. In some cases, it’s tapping authors who’ve previously published books with Amazon Publishing. (“I got the gig because Thomas & Mercer picked my previous novel, Jewball, off the KDP self-publishing pile, and we all got along,” Neal Pollack, the author of a Kindle Serial called “Downward-Facing Death,” wrote in the book’s online forum.) Three are from a startup called Plympton. The company was cofounded by former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8 Lee and novelist Yael Goldstein Love. For the three titles, Amazon paid Plympton up front for a licensing deal that includes digital, print and audio world rights for a limited time.

Prior to the Amazon deal, Plympton had planned to pay its authors $500 an episode plus a bonus, but that changed with the deal — which was lucrative enough, Lee says, the company is “profitable, for now,” and will be able to pay those authors five-figure fees. There’s also a revenue split on serials sold. Amazon pays Plympton royalties directly, and Plympton then splits them with the author.

Kindle Singles and Kindle Direct Publishing offer authors a 70-30 royalty split in most cases. When I asked Jeff Belle, VP of Amazon Publishing, whether the split is the same for Kindle Serials, he didn’t give me a direct answer. “We are offering compelling terms, which will vary based on the proposed work,” he said.

“The third-episode problem”

Claudia Hall Christian is the author of “Denver Cereal,” a long-running online serial that is published daily in 500-word segments and gets 50,000 readers a month. Christian, who has been writing “Denver Cereal” for four years, is a bit skeptical of Kindle Serials. “I think it’s a marketing and advertising strategy,” she said. “Can the authors they’ve chosen actually write serial fiction? The problem with writing serial fiction is that it’s hard.” She hopes that Amazon will tap authors who’ve been writing in the format for a long time.

Plympton’s Goldstein Love echoed Christian’s comments that writing serials is hard. “We have really come across a lot of what we’re calling the third episode problem,” she told me. “It’s a lot easier to write a brilliant first episode of something. In your second episode, you’re continuing that. In the third episode, you realize you have no idea where this is going. It’s a real danger with writing serially. We won’t sign anyone on fully until we see how the first three [episodes] go.”

Amazon exclusives?

Amazon talked with Byliner about including its titles in the Kindle Serials launch. Byliner “had no problem with the pay-once model,” the company’s editor-in-chief Mark Bryant told me, but didn’t want to accept Amazon’s exclusivity requirement. Byliner authors “want their work to be available everywhere, in all the digital bookstores and on every device,” Bryant said. (Many Byliner e-singles are also available as Kindle Singles, but they’re not exclusive to Amazon.) Byliner will still sell individual installments of its serials in the broader Kindle store. Installments are $2.99 apiece.

Going forward, Lee isn’t sure whether Plympton and Amazon will make another deal. “We do not know what we are going to do going forward,” she told me. “But [Amazon] really cares about this format.” All eight Kindle Serials are offered at an “introductory” price of $1.99, which will rise over time, though Amazon’s Belle wouldn’t tell me by how much the increase will be. “It’s still early and we have a lot to learn,” he said. “But what we can say is that we think Serials will always be a great value for readers and a great opportunity for authors.”

Ultimately, writing a serial is a lot of work and takes more time than writing an e-single. “Downward-Facing Death” author Pollack explained a little more about the editorial process in a post for the Huffington Post:

Here’s what [my editor at Amazon] laid out: A book published in installments of 10 to 15 thousand words, over the course of a few months, with each segment ending in a moment of suspense or uncertainty. Each segment would be copy-edited, and edited for content if necessary. Then, when the whole thing was done, the book would get another complete edit, and would be issued in a full Kindle edition as well as a paperback one. The whole process would take about six months.

Further, each Kindle Serial is a flat price – with multiple episodes priced about the same as just one Kindle Single, for now. It seems that Amazon will have to invest more money in this format than it has in Kindle Singles: It has to pay authors more because they are writing more, and it either has to sell the Serials at a significantly higher price accordingly or take a loss. Since it doesn’t appear to be offering the 70/30 revenue split that it does on Kindle Singles and KDP titles, it might also have to pay authors more money up front. So Kindle Serials could be a bigger investment for Amazon than Singles have been.

Jeff Belle doesn’t doubt the pay-once strategy. “We thought this would be the best customer experience for reading a digital serial,” he told me. “in the end, if you focus on the best possible customer experience, the revenue will follow.”

TED’s book apps is built on the platform developed by Brooklyn-based publisher and developer Atavist. That allows for enhanced features like video and audio. For example, videos of TED talks are embedded into some of the books. The videos can be watched anywhere — “subway and airplane-ability are very important to us,” Tom Rielly, TED fellows and community director, told me. They can also be streamed to Apple TV through Airplay. An “embryonic” commenting feature allows readers to leave comments at the end of the books.

Readers can buy the books a la carte for $2.99 each or can purchase a subscription: $14.99 for three months of books. That price includes six books, with one new one delivered every two weeks. “Founding subscribers” — those who sign up in the first 90 days — get free access to all the books in the back catalog. (Authors are paid advances and also get a royalty each time their book is downloaded.)

“Assuming we get enough subscribers,” Rielly said, “we are guaranteeing an author a first printing that is larger than they were used to.” He noted that many TED speakers aren’t full-time authors. “They don’t necessarily have time to write a giant book,” he said, “but they can get one of these books together more quickly.”

But e-singles also could be disruptive for the industry. Because they’re easy to publish quickly, e-singles could become a popular way for authors, magazines and newspapers to bypass traditional publishers. Another potential headache for traditional publishers: So far, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is dominating the e-singles space.

Here’s our overview of the business of e-singles, followed by a chart looking at the major players.

– How the Business Works Amazon started the trend when it launched its Kindle Singles program in January, publishing original pieces on “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length,” usually around 5,000 to 30,000 words, and priced between $0.99 and $4.99. There are currently 80 Kindle Singles, and spokeswoman Sarah Gelman told us about three more are added each week. “As authors and publishers become more aware of Kindle Singles, we have experienced a steady growth in the number of high-quality submissions,” she said. The guidelines for submitting a Kindle Single are here.

Right now, most e-singles–on Amazon and from publishers like Byliner Originals, The Atavist and n+1–are nonfiction. Some cover newsy topics like Catholic priest scandals and gay marriage; there’s also lots of humor, essays and memoir, shorter than a full-length book but longer than what you’d find in a magazine. But there are also some fiction Kindle Singles, like a 15-page short story by David Baldacci and a collection of three short pieces by Jodi Picoult.

Kindle Singles have their own editor–David Blum, who actually provides editorial feedback on the titles. They are heavily promoted on Amazon’s site, and tend to be the first choice of authors and publishers looking to publish an e-single. They have their own section of the Kindle Store, with a separate bestseller list and categories. Kindle Singles aren’t strictly required to be exclusive to Amazon, but a scan of the list shows that most of them are. “It makes selection by our editor more likely and most authors and publishers have chosen that option,” Gelman said. Richard Tofel, the general manager of ProPublica, which has published four Kindle Singles, told us content has to be “original and unique”–i.e., not previously published–to sell it as a Kindle Single. Two of ProPublica’s Kindle Singles, Aftershock and Hydrofracked?, are free as Kindle Singles because they were simultaneously published on ProPublica’s website.

The Kindle Singles store includes lots of big names. Hachette published Baldacci’s No *Time* Left. And literary agent Laura Gross helped her client, Jodi Picoult, publish Leaving Home as a Kindle Single, without the involvement of Picoult’s publisher, *Simon & Schuster*. “Leaving Home has been very successful,” Gross said. “But we understand that Jodi Picoult has a very large base already, so we can’t be sure that lesser-known authors would sell as well.”

– Pricing Trends However, you don’t have to be Jodi Picoult to do well in this format. In fact, lesser-known authors have found success selling e-singles because the works’ low prices move them into impulse-buy territory. If an e-single looks intriguing and is only $0.99, it’s a low-risk purchase. At the moment, the bestselling Kindle Single is Crazy Girls by the relatively unknown comedian Max Lance. (It’s unclear how many copies he has sold — Amazon doesn’t provide sales figures for Kindles or books.) E-singles are “a good way to introduce people to authors they don’t know,” said Hachette Digital SVP Maja Thomas, “or they may have heard the name but for some reason the full-length book hasn’t piqued their curiosity. There’s a low barrier to entry.”

“I think most people look at [the $0.99 price] as a convenience charge for the ability to read these on their e-readers,” said Tofel. “The price seems to work for us.” Arthur Klebanoff, the publisher of RosettaBooks, which has published four Kindle Singles, found that “$2.99 is a good price.” In general, we found few e-singles priced higher than $2.99.

TED Books, which has published six Kindle Singles, is looking to experiment with pricing. “Our plan is to move the series to a subscription model in which a new TED Book comes out every few weeks,” said editor Jim Daly. “We haven’t nailed down a pricing structure yet, but a reader would be able to subscribe to the whole series, as well as purchase individual books.” (TED also plans to release an e-reading app.)

– Sales Figures Publishers declined to provide us with concrete sales numbers on their e-singles. n+1′s Ian Epstein said the publication’s four Kindle Singles, combined, have sold “thousands” of copies since the first one, Octomom and the Politics of Babies, was published in January. “With respect to marketing, n+1 has primarily deferred to Amazon’s efforts,” he said. Klebanoff said RosettaBooks’ Kindle Singles are “enormously successful. Site promotion matters, and we are securing a lot of it.”

– Beyond Amazon Most of the publishers we spoke with are sticking with Kindle Singles for now, but as e-singles take off, those who either don’t want to sell them exclusively through Amazon or aren’t accepted as Kindle Singles are looking to other sites as well. Shorter pieces can be published in the regular Kindle store–the route Time Inc. (NYSE: TWX) has taken, with the exception of Why They Fought, which was chosen as a Kindle Single–or in any other e-bookstore.

But right now, with the exception of the Kindle Singles store, e-book retailers like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Nook and Kobo don’t have special sections for shorter pieces, which may make them less attractive for authors. Separately, since e-book price often doesn’t correspond to length–plenty of full-length e-books are $0.99–shoppers may be confused about what they’re buying, or feel ripped off when a book they believed to be full-length is actually less than 30,000 words long. And it’s not easy to tell how long e-book originals are. Amazon and Apple list e-books’ comparative “print length,” which provides shoppers with some kind of visual for how long the book is. Nook, though, lists e-books’ file size, which isn’t a helpful metric for most users who don’t know how many kilobytes a standard-length book is. Kobo doesn’t include any length or size metric at all.

It’s possible that other e-tailers are waiting to see how Kindle Singles do before they add their own “singles” sections. But since many of the publishers we spoke to are quite happy with Kindle Singles, particularly with the additional marketing provided in that section of the site, stores like Nook may have to start trying harder to woo them.

– Challenges Newspapers have just begun experimenting with e-singles, though the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) has yet to get into the game. An NYT spokeswoman told us that “several projects are under consideration” but would not comment further. Up to now, the e-singles we’ve seen from news publications tend toward collections of previously published material. It remains to be seen how interested readers are in what are mostly repurposed news stories–especially since most of the material is already free online. That could be why the NYT is taking its time entering the space.

Trade book publishers, meanwhile, have reasons to be wary of e-singles if authors choose to work around them. As mentioned above, Jodi Picoult published hers with her agent, leaving Simon & Schuster (NYSE: CBS) out. Depending on the case, publishers may be glad for the extra publicity that the e-singles bring to the longer books, or they may be upset not to get cut in on the deal. And when publishers work with Kindle Singles, they’re in the unique–and possibly uncomfortable–position of having Amazon publish them.

Here’s a snapshot of the various publishers offering e-singles so far.