Amazon.com to sell its own literature

Digital copies, written exclusively for the website, are avavilable for 49 cents apiece.  These short pieces range from 2000 to 10,000 words.  About sixty authors have signed up, including Danielle Steel.  On Friday the bestselling title was Harry Dent’s "Bubble After Bubble in the Ongoing Bubble Boom: Oil Bursts, the Housing Bubble Fades and Now Stocks Emerge Into a Greater Bubble That Finally Ends in 2010."

Here is the story.  Will this practice render short story compilations, or perhaps magazines of fiction, obsolete?  As with iPod, won’t consumers prefer the unbundled units?  Or does fiction differ by giving the editors and compilers a greater role in producing excitement and cache? 

Addendum: Here is a good story on the marketing of ebooks, and one entrepreneurs who thinks the days of paper books are over.