Byliner Gone Bad And The Business of Longform Journalism on The Web

On Christmas Eve Day in 2012, I sat in a Starbucks and wrote an enthusiastic post about why it had been the year of the e-single. E-singles - works of journalism between 3,000 to 15,000 words, usually nonfiction and sold as individual ebooks - were "a true digital-native format," I wrote, "the format for our time," ideal to read curled up with your iPad.

With the crash and burn of Byliner this year, however, my enthusiasm seems less than prescient. Byliner, which launched in 2011, was one of the darlings of the literary startup scene