Kirkus dies. Kindle blooms, sort of.

Let the iTunes-ization of short fiction begin.

Starting on Monday, Amazon will sell two stories, one by Christopher Buckley and the other by Edna O’Brien, through its Kindle store. The stories have been selected and edited by the staff at The Atlantic, the venerable magazine that once published short fiction in its print pages monthly.

Priced at $3.99 each, the stories, which will bear the Atlantic logo, are exclusively available on the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reader, and will not appear in the print version of the magazine. The Atlantic’s editors plan to offer about two Kindle stories every month.

I would love to live in a world where a reader would pay $4 for a short story—but does anyone think that world actually exists? Four bucks for a story makes even less sense in the context of the $9 benchmark for e-bestsellers. I know the industry's kind of muddling around, trying to figure out price points, but this one comes straight out of someone's ass.