Amazon.com sells 'shorts`

Online book store Amazon.com is now selling short stories, and even alternate chapters or single scenes from novels, for 49 US cents each, Associated Press reports.

"Amazon Shorts," on sale from Monday, have no printed editions and are only delivered digitally.

"Amazon Shorts will help authors find new readers and help readers find and discover authors they`ll love," said Steve Kessel, Amazon.com`s VP of digital media. "We hope that by making short-form literature widely and easily available, Amazon.com can help to fuel a revival of this kind of work."

Publishers have always had a hard time selling and marketing the single, short-form work - the novella, or the novelette, or the even shorter "novelini", he said.

Customers can now find Amazon Shorts from accomplished authors, such as Danielle Steel or Tama Janowitz, in various genres and formats, including alternate chapters and scenes to well-known stories, personal memoirs, one-act plays and classic short stories.

America Online is plunging deeper into the growing online business of reselling tickets to rock concerts, sporting events and other live shows reports Reuters.

The Time Warner unit is set to announce that it has lined up TicketsNow.com as the second partner in the ticketing endeavour, having previously struck a deal with StubHub.com.

While AOL has been selling secondary live-event tickets for several months, it had been doing so without a dedicated Web home until the official unveiling of http://www.AOLTicketMarketplace.com. The service also is available at AOL CityGuide and for subscribers at the appropriate AOL keyword.

In gathering competing ticketers StubHub and TicketsNow under one virtual roof, AOL is following a strategy it laid out more than five years ago with its primary ticketing business, when it partnered with Ticketmaster, Tickets.com, Telecharge.com, Showtickets.com and Cygnus.

South Africans are warming to the concept of online shopping, according to a report on finance24.com. The report quotes Visa International CEMEA as saying South Africans used Visa cards to make 89 050 e-commerce purchases worth over R84 million in the year ending June 2005. The average transaction value was R948.

The report said the growth in online shopping was fuelled by the convenience of online shopping and the ability to access specialised products not available on the local market.

Despite this growth, SA did not have the highest volume of value of online shopping in the region. Mauritius topped the list, followed by United Arab Emirates and Russia. SA was rated fifth.