Novelist Julian Gough lauds e-readers for freeing authors to write as much as they want, not as much as their publishers demand:
Writers can seldom express ideas “at their natural length,” because in the world of traditional print only a few lengths are commercially viable. Write too long, and you’ll be told to cut it (as Stephen King was when The Stand came in too long to be bound in paperback). Worse, write too short, and you won’t get published at all. Your perfect story is 50 pages long – or 70, or 100? Good luck getting that printed anywhere.
The high fixed overheads of book production – printing, binding, warehousing and distributing a labor-intensive physical object – have tended to make books of fewer than 100 pages too expensive for the customer. (And print magazines and newspapers can take works of only 10, maybe 15 pages, max.) But although commercial print publishers have never liked novellas or novelettes, authors always have. Indeed, many writers have done their best work at that length, despite the difficulty of finding publication (Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener; Kafka’s The Metamorphosis).
Zach Schonfeld adds:
Journalists have even more reason to celebrate: Here, finally, is an outlet for essays and long-form investigations too lengthy for a magazine slot but not quite weighty enough for a book deal. Writers could always share such pieces on their own blogs and the like, but isn’t it nice to get paid? Hence the advent of sites like The Atavist and, more recently, Epic.
The Dish 