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The Master of Macabre Jump-starts E-books

By Mike Kaltschnee

 

Stephen King's Riding the BulletON MARCH 14, Stephen King, whom some may consider a lower class of novelist, may have single-handedly jump-started the electronic book market. "Riding the Bullet," King's first published effort since his well-publicized car accident, was released only in a digital format. No print version of this story will be made available.

A short story, only 66 pages of an equivalent print edition, "Riding the Bullet" sells for about $2.50. However, on March 14 it was made available for free-for one day only. This caused an almost complete meltdown of the entire E-book distribution network. Barnes & Noble had more than 200,000 requests for the book in 24 hours and had to post an apology early in the day. Spread this across a large number of resellers (Amazon.com, Borders, etc.), and you can easily estimate a million copies (or more) in the first week.

I downloaded the Glassbook edition, which was free. It took about ten tries and a lot of frustration, but I finally got it. The Glassbook reader lets you read E-books on your PC. Most E-books are encrypted, so you can't just pass stories you've read on to another user. You can "loan" the book to someone else, but while they have it you can't read it. The Glassbook reader is based on Adobe Acrobat technology (the same product you can use to view the online edition of dacs.doc) but has an interface more suited to reading. I found my notebook screen to be adequate for viewing the story, but with only two to three hours of battery life and six pounds of computer to deal with, it wasn't a satisfying experience.

Next I paid $2.50 for the Peanut Press edition for the Palm Pilot (they didn't offer a free version) and wound up reading the story in bed with all of the lights off. (Isn't this how you're supposed to read a ghost story?) Peanut Press has created a great little document reader that has many useful features, including the ability to rotate the screen. I was surprised how comfortable it was to read on the Palm using the built-in backlight. Even though the screen holds little more than a paragraph, it was easy to turn "pages." The hour-long reading session used hardly any battery life.

But the palm screen is small, black and white, and has a very low-resolution display. So it is hardly a replacement for a book as we still know it, which is easier to read and also a lot sturdier. There is hope, though. Microsoft has been promising the ClearType technology and an E-book reader for some time. It's rumored to be coming soon-and with it a whole library of available books. Imagine being able to carry 20, or even 100, novels with you at any time. You'll be able to loan someone a book just by beaming them a file instead of loaning them one of your well-thumbed, bound friends in hopes they might be good enough to return it to you someday.

The Rocket eBookI can't finish this article without mentioning the Rocket eBook, or the SoftBook. Both are great devices with screens about twice the size of my Palm. They are extremely useful, since you can load them with books, reference materials, or even Web pages for reading virtually anywhere. These devices were both acquired by the Gemstar Company, so we can expect to see a large marketing campaign very soon.

E-books are creating a niche for documents that are typically too long for a magazine article, yet too short for a book. In the past, a collection of these stories was published in a single book.

Another great thing about E-books is the short time to market. Rather than the typical year for a Stephen King book to hit the streets, it took only ten weeks to launch "Riding the Bullet."

The electronic book industry has matured over the two years I've been following it (drooling over it, rather). It has just standardized a new, open electronic books specification, which should mean that a single book should be readable on any device that supports them, including notebooks, PDAs, E-books, and your Web browser. I'm beginning to think that this is as big a change to the book industry as the printing press.

A closing note: Stephen King, a loyal Macintosh user, was frustrated that no editions were made available for the Mac. However, this should be corrected by the time you read this.


Mike Kaltschnee writes about technology for DACS and is a co-founder of WebSpice.com. You can contact Mike online at mikek@demorgan.com.

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