New books in small bites

Snippet e-bookstore
Free for iOS devices at Apple App Store

Electronic publishing is quickly coming of age, thanks to the efforts of Amazon.com. Now here’s an upstart e-book service with a new approach to selling and publishing content.

Snippet is designed for readers who like their literature in small bites. Authors must create their works in chapters that can be no longer than 1,000 words each. Readers can purchase the work piece by piece. Each chapter can be priced between 99 cents and $4.99. Authors can supplement their works with photos, videos and audio files. It costs a flat $99 to publish a book on Snippet, and the author can keep half of all revenue generated by sales.

The Snippet app is lovely to look at. But there’s hardly anything to read there--a yoga manual and a couple of self-help books. Because if it catches on, Snippet promises to be an unusually good e-book system, with low prices and seamless multimedia integration. In addition, it offers a simple, inexpensive way to publish essays, short fiction and other worthy works that don’t require a full-length treatment. There’ve been lots of efforts to make short-form writing profitable on the Internet. Snippet is one of the most appealing yet.