TED Starts an E-Books Line

The conference superstar TED is getting into the e-book business.

DESCRIPTIONThe popular conference will begin publishing e-books.

TED, known for exclusive events and online videos of speeches by celebrities like Al Gore, Bono and Malcolm Gladwell, plans to publish its own short e-books, beginning with three that went on sale Wednesday.

“We’ve been dreaming for a long time about whether we could do something in books,” Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, said on Tuesday. “In the last year, seeing the explosion in popularity of digital reading has really sparked a new way of thinking about it.”

A TEDBook will be longer than a long magazine article but shorter than a typical book, clocking in at 10,000 to 20,000 words, “in a way that matches modern attention spans,” the publisher said. Each book will be sold for $2.99 on Amazon.com.

Since e-books began to take off, publishers have begun experimenting with shorter books and single essays or stories, with mixed success. Without concerns about printing and physical distribution, they have found it simpler to sell electronic content in a significantly shorter length than that of the usual print book.

Penguin Book Group, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins have all sold individual short stories or essays online for prices ranging from 99 cents to $7.99.

“When you’re in a digital world and you can author a book at a shorter length than you could in print, then all bets are off and it absolutely makes sense,” Mr. Anderson said. “In the world of print, you really couldn’t put this opportunity in front of people in a meaningful way because it would be a very thin book and people wouldn’t take it seriously.”

The first books to be published by TED are “The Happiness Manifesto: How Nations and People Can Nurture Well-Being,” by Nic Marks; “Dangerism: Why We Worry About the Wrong Things, and What It’s Doing to Our Kids,” by Gever Tulley; and “Homo Evolutis: Please Meet the Next Human Species,” by Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans.

Mr. Anderson said that Amazon takes a 30 percent cut of revenue and the rest is split evenly between TED and the author. Eventually, TED will publish one book each month, he said.