The Atlantic, a magazine well known for publishing short fiction, will now be selling short stories in the Kindle Store. Priced at just $3.99 a pop, these stories reportedly fall somewhere in between a magazine-length feature and a full book. Short fiction usually has the dubious honor of being relegated to short story collections, but for the first time, the Kindle will make them commercially available in a sort of a la carte arrangement.

Of course, this is not the first instance of a content provider deciding to publish directly on the Kindle. Stephen King fans might remember earlier this year when Stephen King published his novella Ur exclusively on the Kindle. (Of course, that particular story happened to revolve around a mysterious pink Kindle which delivered menacing extra-dimensional literature to an unsuspecting professor, so it’s hard to say that it doesn’t actually belong there.)

For all the whining the Newspapers are doing about Amazon’s publishing deals being unfair, their burgeoning relationship with short story authors seems quite promising. In addition to an up-front fee, authors will get to split the sales revenue with Amazon and The Atlantic. Publishing exclusively through Amazon does limit their distribution to a certain extent, but this is the kind of literature that often gets buried in obscure journals anyway, so any commercial presence at all is a boon.

While they’re starting small with it, this could turn into a pretty big deal for both Amazon and the authors involved. The publishing industry as it exists today is designed to filter out any written works which aren’t commercially viable enough to commit to the page. It’s inherently exclusionary. When you remove the need to go through the costly process of printing material, it starts to look a lot less risky to publish material which might have seemed too borderline or obscure under the old system.

I think this is a niche which it would behoove Amazon to help expand. Lowering the barrier for aspiring authors to get published, and especially those who work with short fiction, is only going to increase the Kindle’s popularity amongst the world’s most prolific readers.

Personally, I’d like to see some authors experiment with the platform a little bit. Stephen King’s inclusion of the Kindle into his story was done in a sort of ham-handed way to mixed success, but somebody really needs to write a piece of fiction that breaks the fourth wall for Kindle users in the same way that Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions does for readers of print.

Regardless, these are exciting times. Since Gutenberg first developed the printing press in 1440, the book industry hasn’t really been one to usher in big changes. This might be the start of a process that will finally bring them into the 21st century.