As e-books become ubiquitous—and 2010, finally, will be the year that this happens—it stands to reason that authors will change their writing to fit the new format. Besides comic books, which almost look better on large, full-color screens than on paper, short stories and novellas will probably be the biggest beneficiaries of the e-book rush; attention spans will undoubtedly suffer on devices that can connect to the internet, and a file containing a 95-page book looks just the same as a file containing a 450-page book. The novella has withered in recent years to become an almost-unused format. A few publishers, most notably Melville House’s the Contemporary Art of the Novella imprint, have kept the short-book flag flying, but publishers have mostly abandoned the form.
One new publisher, Madras Press, is doing its part to revive the novella. It has released four new short fictions that are as satisfying as a book two or three times the size. Aimee Bender’s Madras entry, The Third Elevator, isn’t even 50 pages long, but it’s a complex fable about three magic elevators, a logger, and several birds. In a collection of stories, it would be duller somehow, in the way that a series of jokes collectively can murder the humor in each other. Standing on its own, it feels unique.
Trinie Dalton’s Sweet Tomb barely scrapes a hundred pages, but it feels dense next to Bender’s short, light fairy tale. It’s a handful of snapshots about a young witch named Candy who lives in a candy house and practices witchcraft in a pleasantly nonchalant manner. She struggles with the foibles of modern-day love like everyone else:
Until I could find a man who’d be into fathering a witch, I wasn’t going to give in to the easy options: a virgin birth or growing a baby in a head of cabbage.
The standout of the Madras collection, though, is Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat. It’s a short story about a dinner party that has been rotted through with jealousy, and it’s as good a fiction as you’ll find in any major literary magazine. As an e-book, any one of these titles would be as satisfying as a novel, but Madras only publishes corporeally. Each book is slender and square, with a pretty cover and an ex-libris plate printed inside, making it an object of uncommon beauty. It figures that as an art form gets a push from a new platform, it takes the older, more mature medium that spawned it to show the way to the future. 
A novella was the first thing I bought for my Kindle.
While I don’t agree that “attention spans will suffer” if you’re a reader (and the majority of devices still don’t have internet connectivity anyway – who needs it?), yes, the novella will undoubtedly get a boost.
I am looking forward to the whole industry breaking away from the 200-pager for cheap genre/unknown author and then the sudden jump to the 450-page doorstop.