Amazon is rolling out a separate section of its Kindle store meant for shorter content—meatier than long-form journalism, but shorter than a typical book. Called "Kindle Singles," the content will be distributed like other Kindle books but will likely fall between 10,000 and 30,000 words, or the equivalent of a few chapters from a novel.

The company believes that some of the best ideas don't need to be stretched to more than 50,000 words in order to get in front of readers, nor do they need to be chopped down to the length of a magazine article.

"Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format," Amazon's VP of Kindle Content Russ Grandinetti said in a statement. (Anyone who has ever read a terrible "business" or "self-help" book consisting of a single idea furiously puffed up into 200 pages of pabulum will no doubt agree with this sentiment.)

The Kindle Singles section isn't open yet; that's because the company still needs to find the content. Amazon is putting out a call to "serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians, and publishers" to submit their work for consideration, and once the store is up and going, users will be able to read it on all of their Kindle-accessible devices.

Amazon doesn't explicitly say whether it plans to charge for Kindle Singles, but we assume the company will allow authors to name a price like they do in the normal Kindle store. The question is: what will people be willing to pay for a short book or long story?