Hasta La Ideas

Brainy nonprofit TED is turning its passion for “ideas worth spreading” into slim volumes that it hopes readers will consider worth downloading. The technology, entertainment, and design mavens today launched TED Books, an imprint of short nonfiction works that will be available as Kindle Singles in Amazon’s Kindle Store. “TED Books are to Books as TED Talks are to lectures,” wrote TED curator Chris Anderson in an e-mail to the TED community. “They’re short, pithy, riveting. They’re designed to express a single big idea in a way that can be absorbed in a single sitting.” At between 10,000 and 20,000 words, TED Books fall between a TED Talk and a traditional book. They are priced at $2.99 each. The first three titles (pictured) are by TED conference alumni who detail an idea—promoting well-being on a national and personal level, a bold new world of human-directed evolution, and why you shouldn’t worry so much about the previous two ideas—alluded to in each of their talks. Six more TED Books are in production, and discussions with other authors are underway. Might we suggest that TED tap one of the design minds that have graced its stage in years past? The digital covers of the TED Books, which place their gesticulating authors against a spotlit black ground, have a goofy Sesame Street-meets-Instructional-Language-Video aesthetic that makes us flinch.

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