NEW YORK - Mitch Albom has a new book out - well, not really a book, but a commencement speech in book form. And not in traditional book form, but as an e-book, published exclusively through Amazon.com's Kindle reader.

"Commencement Speech To His Nephew's Graduating Class: May 30, 2008, Nice France" went on sale Thursday for 99 cents. The Kindle is not available in Canada.

It won't be a money maker for Albom - proceeds are being donated to a Detroit-based charity for the homeless - but it does offer a test for the digital device that has created a great debate about the future of books and great speculation over how much the Kindle is part of that future.

Amazon.com has declined to offer specific numbers for the Kindle, a vacuum eagerly filled by industry insiders and the media, which has estimated sales as anywhere from a very modest 10,000 to a more encouraging 100,000-plus.

E-books are unquestionably growing although public sightings of the Kindle remain rare enough that one blog, Silicon Alley Insider, announced last month, "Imagine our delight when we got on the subway, sat down, and saw a person reading an Amazon Kindle - right in front of us! - for the first time since it launched last November."

Albom's speech could be a way to measure the Kindle connection. He is a brand-name author whose million sellers include "Tuesdays With Morrie" and "The Five People You Meet in Heaven." The text of his speech, less than 4,000 words, is brief for a traditional book, but ideal for a quick read on a portable device.

"We thought doing it through the Kindle would be an exciting way to bring readers to Mitch and to his work," said Albom's agent, David Black, adding that there were no immediate plans to expand the speech and release it on paper.

"I think that Amazon has been wonderfully creative in developing new means of reaching readers and that's an incredibly important element of the book business as it is evolving."

"I was surprised at how this little talk resonated with people, but I am happy to share it with a wider audience and raise money for a good cause at the same time," Albom, whose speech was delivered at The International School Of Nice, said in a statement Thursday. "The immediacy of the Internet and what Amazon is doing with Kindle is interesting to me, as it is to many authors."

Albom's current and previous publisher at Hyperion Books, which releases his paper texts, both say they support his e-book project. Ellen Archer, who became publisher in April, said she welcomed "this exciting digital publishing initiative." Her predecessor, Robert Miller, said there will be "a lot of experimentation with formats in the months and years ahead."

"That might include combining e-book sales with regular book sales, or having the e-book precede the regular book, or any number of other approaches that give readers new ways to enjoy books," said Miller, who now heads the Harper Studio imprint at HarperCollins, where he will specialize in brief works sold in a variety of formats. "And I don't think that these approaches are necessarily competitive; when a reader has a great experience reading something by Mitch on their Kindle, that may lead them to reading his other books as well, in electronic form or otherwise."

Hyperion, publisher of Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture," has it own history of turning a speech into a hit. Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, gave a lecture last September in which he spoke of suffering from pancreatic cancer and likely having just months to live. A video of the speech became an Internet sensation and an expanded edition is now a best-selling book, on paper and on the Kindle.

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