latest
Kindle Vella is Amazon's new interactive reading experience that's only available on iOS for some reason
Looks like we’ll at least be able to see these stories on the web on Android
Kindle Vella sounds like a rather innovative project in a world where novels and other book formats are dominating much of the industry. Vella wants to give authors the option to publish short, interactive stories in a serialized format, created for mobile devices foremost. All mobile devices, you ask? No, in an unexplainable move, only iOS users get to fully enjoy this innovative new format, with Vella unavailable in the Kindle Android app.As Amazon explains, Vella is part of its Kindle Direct Publishing program (KDP), which allows independent authors to publish their work for free, both digitally and in paperback. Vella stories consist of easily digestible chunks of 600 to 5,000 words, with the first three episodes available for free (if you've ever heard of the concept of "chapters," this episode-based format should feel familiar). In case you want to know how a story continues, you'll have to pay to unlock it by purchasing or acquiring tokens (microtransactions, yay!), which are available in bundles on Amazon.com and the iOS Kindle app — but not in the Android app.