Stephen King's not scared of trusting online readers

["NewsScan" <newsscan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

He's back.  Horror writer Stephen King has now used his Web site
(www.stephenking.com) to post the first two installments of his new
novel
"The Plant," which is about a "vampire" plant that takes over a
publishing
company.  The material will be posted as pdf files, and readers will be
trusted to pay the author a dollar to download it.  If King receives
payment
for at least 75% of the downloads, he will continue with his plans to
post
the remainder of the book on the Web.  People in the publishing industry
are
skeptical.  Literary agent Mort Janklow says that King is "a fellow
sitting
up in Maine having fun, but it's not a way to run a business."  And
National
Writers' Union president Jonathan Tasini says, "You still need a lot of
money and power to promote a book.  The same people who already make a
good
living at the top of the bestseller list may have another way to sell,
but I
don't believer there will be dramatic change for other authors."
[AP/[San Jose] *Mercury News*, 24 Jul 2000; NewsScan Daily, 24 July 2000
http://www.sjmercury.com/svtech/news/breaking/ap/docs/230313l.htm]

The truth about e-books

Despite the hoopla surrounding the e-publishing of Stephen King's
novella,
"Riding the Bullet," the truth is that most of the 500,000 electronic
copies
distributed were purchased by Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com, which then
gave
them away, and many other copies downloaded were simply "experiments" by
people who wanted to see if the technology worked.  According to a
survey of
3,000 subscribers conducted by the Book Report Network, only 1%, or
5,000,
of those who downloaded King's first e-book actually read it.  "No
reader is
asking for e-books," says Book Report Network CEO Carol Fitzgerald. 
"This
is not the Sony Walkman." Publisher Simon & Schuster, which distributed
the
novella, disputes the Book Report sampling.  [*Los Angeles Times*, 24
Jul
2000 http://www.latimes.com/business/20000724/t000069317.html NewsScan
Daily, 24 July 2000]

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