Writer's Report 2.0

Stephen King was the first prominent, best-selling author to exclusively publish a novella in the e-book format. He believed it would be a growing industry, but not that it would ever replace real books. He met with limited success.

Now King is back with his e-book only novella “UR”. Its release coincided with the launch of Amazon’s upgraded Kindle 2 reader.

In 2000, in the early years of e-books, King’s novella Riding the Bullet was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, the load overwhelming all online sites offering it. Although it seemed a little dated then, I still liked it.

He followed that with the story The Plant. King offered the book in unencrypted installments. He requested that people use the honor system and pay one-dollar for each installment. He warned that he’d drop the project if the percentage of paying readers fell below 75 percent.

The percentage of paying customers dropped and true to his word, the project stopped after six installments – the story incomplete.

King said there would be more, but that other projects needed to be finished first. To date there has been no further mention of the story. Too bad, I was into the story when it stopped. Yes, I paid, but only for the first three installments. I thought it was an inefficient, pain-in-the-ass way to pay for a story.

Currently, “UR” is ranked No. 11 on Amazon’s list of Kindle best-sellers and is available as a download for $2.99. It’s about a college English instructor whose pink Kindle allows him to access new books by famous dead authors as well as newspapers that tell of a future event that he is compelled to try to forestall. Some readers have likened the book to an infomercial for the pricey e-book reader.

The Kindle 2 is a slimmed-down model of the original with upgraded components and storage capacity. It went on sale Feb. 9 for $359.

The device downloads books, newspaper stories and blog posts over a wireless network.

At a time when the book industry is going through tough times, it was reported this e-book was released to “create some excitement” in electronic publishing. Although the Kindle and competing devices account for no more than 1 percent of overall book sales, I can tell you the younger generations are going to continue to adapt to this format over traditional book over time.

King sees the Kindle as a delivery system that matters less than the story it delivers. Last year, King wrote in his blog, on the Entertainment Weekly site, the Kindle will not replace books, that there’s a “…a permanence to books that underlines the importance of the ideas and the stories we find inside them…”

But they can, he wrote, enrich a reader’s life.

“For a while I was very aware that I was looking at a screen and bopping a button instead of turning pages. Then the story simply swallowed me, as the good ones always do,” King wrote. “It became about the message instead of the medium, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”