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"Howard Polskin has had a front row seat to the many changes in the publishing industry spurred by digital innovations during the past decade, but it was one moment in 2012 that really opened his eyes. Polskin, who served as an executive VP at the Magazine Publishers of America, met with a media startup called Byliner that publishes feature article and works of short fiction as e-books, often referred to as e-book singles or e-singles.\nAfter meeting with the company, he downloaded a few singles and hopped on a flight back to New York. By the time he landed, Polskin was hooked on the format, but there was just one problem: He had trouble finding a good guide for what e-book singles to read next. So he decided to launch a startup of his own called Thin Reads to solve this problem.\n\"If you become a fan of e-book singles, one of the things you want to know is what's new,\" Polskin told Mashable. \"Most content industries do a very good job of that, but in new, emerging forms of media, it's not that easy to find out what's new. That's exactly why I started this.\" \nThin Reads, which officially launched Monday, aims to provide a comprehensive database of new singles releases, along with reviews of these digital books and interviews with the authors. Polskin single-handedly researches new releases on the three major retail outlets \u2014 Amazon's Kindle Singles, Apple's Quick Reads in the iBookstore and Barnes &amp; Noble's Nook Snaps \u2014 as well browsing through new releases on the websites of about 20 publishers. \n\nBeyond just crawling for information on new releases, Polskin is using his network of industry contacts to attract book reviewers and work with publishers directly to get information about upcoming releases. He's already gotten one publisher to agree to send him the equivalent of a digital galley for a book for review. \"We're really trying to train publishers to do this because there really wasn't anyone doing this before.\"\nUntil now, readers could visit the Kindle Singles store online or browse through Apple's selection of iBooks on their iPad or iPhone, but Polskin hopes to put information about works across platforms under one roof and provide the kind of reviews and context for these books that you might find in a literary publication like Publisher's Weekly.\nIn the process of compiling details about all the new digital releases, Polskin is also collecting a treasure trove of data on the state of e-book singles marketplace. For example, he found that that there were 83 e-book singles released in the first quarter of 2013 \u2014 averaging about one release per day \u2014 and more than half of all the works listed in the database are original, meaning they were created specifically for the digital platform. Polskin plans to issue a quarterly report breaking down this data.\nImages courtesy of Amazon and Thin Reads"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/04/08/thin-reads/>