In my email today, a email from Chris Anderson of TED,
I’m delighted to share with you a significant new step in our efforts to promote "ideas worth spreading". We’re announcing today the launch of TED Books. TED Books are to Books as TED Talks are to lectures. They’re short, pithy, riveting. They’re designed to express a single big idea in a way that can be absorbed in a single sitting. A typical 18-minute TED Talk might be around 2000 words. A typical traditional book is at least 60,000 words. TED Books nicely fill the gap in between. They come in at 10,000-20,000 words. So they can be read and absorbed in an hour or two.
These books are designed for electronic distribution. We are launching with the Amazon Kindle Singles program which opened today. The Kindle platform allows books to be read on iPad, iPhone, Android phones, PC and Mac – as well as the dedicated Kindle readers. Each TED Book costs just $2.99 (but may cost more in international markets)
Interestingly me and Nicole were just talking about my Kindle and reading non-fiction books. I have quite a few non-fiction books like Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent tipping point. I regularly lend them out to friends and family.
I’ll be interested to see what permissions are attached to the these ebooks. Ideally it would be very open and easily sharable. But thats not going to happen… Wishful thinking on my behalf I think but its a shame because the authors seems to be publishing under the TED brand, so I imagine it wouldn’t be that hard to convince the authors to make there work freely available or at least with less restrictions. Oh well…
