The fact that Amazon.com is going to publish a series of short biographies isn't news. But how Amazon is going to sell the short biographies is news:

The series is called “Amazon Lives.” The New York Times reports that the biographies in the series will be 25,000 to 40,000 words long and [former publisher James] Atlas will acquire and edit at least 12 of them. The first title will be published in June 2013. (Publishers Weekly broke the news about Atlas but didn’t have more details.)

Unlike all of the other e-books that Amazon has published so far, the “Amazon Lives” series will not be exclusive to the Kindle Store. The NYT first reported this and Amazon confirmed it, telling me, “The books will be available to be sold everywhere in all formats.” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish the print versions, as it is with other Amazon Publishing titles.)

This is the first time that Amazon will publish e-books that are not in their proprietary Kindle format. I hope that it isn't the last; after a certain point, e-book adoption will begin to suffer because people won't want to be locked into a single store's e-book format. This is a promising step for Amazon.