Got ten minutes? Order up a timed e-chapter

On January 25, Harvard Business Review and Amazon.com announced the release of Short Cuts, a collection of excerpts from Harvard Business Review Press publications that are categorized by the time it takes to read them (i.e., "30-minute read" or "10-minute read").

A total of 117 chapters from ten different Harvard Business Review Press books will be available for download, including sections from Leading Change by John P. Kotter, The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, and The Future of Management by Gary Hamel. Prices vary, but a sample 30-minute read - chapter 8 from Leading Change - goes for $5.93.

The individual chapters and summaries are intended to be a source of business knowledge for on-the-go users while they drink their morning coffee, wait for a meeting, or travel for business. Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content, called Short Cuts "a digestible serving of information, all available to download in under 60 seconds."

The chapters be exclusive to the Kindle Store for three months.

Publisher's Weekly calls the release of Short Cuts "a move that reflects growing interest in selling books by chapters." In 2008, Random House released individual e-chapters of its business bestseller Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, and in 2009 Silon & Schuster began selling individual e-chapters of its You series by Doctors Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz.