The American Reporter

WELCOME TO THE INTERNET, STEPHEN KING

By Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

WASHINGTON -- The Internet gets another big-name test this week as horror writer Stephen King and his publisher take a King story to exclusive electronic publication.

On Tuesday, King's latest short story, "Riding the Bullet," goes on sale as an e-book. For $2.50, customers can download the story and read it electronically. Printed, the story runs to 66 pages, according to a report from the Associated Press. It will be offered through the Web sites of booksellers and e-book manufacturers, AP reported.

The press release makes clear that King and his publisher, Simon & Schuster Online, are playing a cat-and-mouse game with cyberspace. Like so many newspaper publishers, King and Simon & Schuster are going at this cautiously and safely, without real exuberance and unwilling to commit a great number of pages of a manuscript to the venture in the new medium.

"I'm curious to see what sort of response there is and whether or not this is the future," King told the AP.

No, Stephen, this is not the future; this is the now -- the present. Welcome aboard.

I'm going out on a cyber-limb here and predicting that "Riding the Bullet" will be a raging online success.

According to the wire service's reading of industry experts, "some science fiction writers have experimented with cyberspace-only distribution of their work." This gives you some idea of the category into which the Internet fits in publisher's minds -- SciFi.

These "industry officials" sound cautious and unenthusiastic (perhaps frightened). They remind me of newspaper publishers a few years back who were fearful of "giving the content away." Now newspapers, with a few blind exceptions, are about to turn a corner where online edition operations are as important and as fully staffed as print newsrooms.

Each day, it seems, another Luddite newspaper publisher discovers the Internet is more than e-mail and realizes that online news is a partner not a competitor.

So now the book publishers come along with the same arrogant reluctance to acknowledge an Internet revolution.

"This is really the first effective market test," one expert told the AP.

Says another: "We're dealing with a new technology here, and not many people are comfortable with the idea of reading an e-book."

Where does this notion come from that online readers are not true readers?

Research has informed us for years that the average newspaper reader spends 20 minutes each day with his or her broadsheet or tabloid. Are these supposed to represent quality readers?

Similarly, we've known that prime time tv news gives consumers 17 minutes of headlines, eye-food and sound bites. Is this an audience of quality readers?

I've never bought into the comfort argument: "The Internet will never replace the newspaper because you can't carry a computer into the bathroom stall and read it," early cynics said of Internet news.

Realistically, what percentage of newspaper readers consume their daily quota of news and features in the can?

Furthermore, I've read that 90 percent of the books produced in the world are purchased by 10 percent of the people. Even if the figures are wrong, I'm betting the buyers of books are avid users of the Internet.

I predict that King's short story will succeed beyond Simon & Schuster's wildest pessimistic projection, and the $2.50 short story will evolve into King's next novel -- online for $14.95 over a secure line.

Sometimes one's insights come from revisiting old, familiar friends. I had this experience as I reread poet Kenneth Koch's book on teaching poetry to grade-school children, "Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?"

Koch criticizes the textbooks of children's poetry as being "empty and safe." Such books avoid "serious emotion" and "any complex way of looking at things," Koch writes.

His pupils, Koch asserts, write better poems than are in the textbooks.

"There is," Koch writes, "a condescension toward children's minds and abilities in regard to poetry in almost every elementary text."

A similar condescending attitude toward the Internet has been a part of the newspaper world for years and persists in many pockets still. Apparently, a similar "empty and safe" vision reigns in the book publishing world.

The phenomenon of e-commerce is wide open, and publishers are just beginning to test its potential.