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By Chris Meadows

king History really is repeating itself today.

You will probably get tired of Amazon news by the time this day is over, and certainly we will wait the bulk of our coverage until Amazon actually makes its announcements. (Engadget is tweeting the 10 a.m. ET press conference live, here.) However, I noticed something in this Wall Street Journal story that simply required comment.

It appears that Amazon will announce it has acquired a Stephen King work for exclusive publication on its Kindle. The work will apparently feature an e-book device prominently in the story itself. (King has already written a novel in which cell phones kill everyone who uses them. One wonders if King is going to do something similar for e-book readers now?)

King and e-books have a long, sordid history. King’s novella "Riding the Bullet" was released exclusively as an e-book as a publicity stunt, and became one of the first e-book bestsellers. The book’s e-success inspired King to leverage the e-book phenomenon to throw one of his old unfinished projects up on the Internet and see if enough people would shell out to make it worthwhile for him to finish it. Thus was born The Plant.

Unfortunately, King set highly unrealistic conditions for the e-book project to "succeed" and hence be continued. He required a certain percentage of all downloads be paid for, at $1 each—and counted each download separately. So, if a person downloaded a copy for his desktop and a copy in a different format for his PDA, he would be required to pay twice—unlike such stores as Baen, who would let purchasers download a book in any format as often as they wanted after they had paid for it once.

It was easy to predict what would happen next. The percentage of paying customers eventually fell below King’s requirement, so he ceased work on the book halfway through. Having only earned a paltry $463,832 in profits after costs were deducted, he felt it was a better use of his time to move on to other projects. Clearly, the market was simply not mature for e-books yet if writing half a novel could not even earn him half a million dollars.

Although, looking back, it is hard to see how much the success of The Plant could have helped the e-book market in the absence of mature e-ink technology, it was certainly not helpful for an author of King’s stature to declare loudly that the market was not there yet.

And now the wheel turns around again, and the myopic mega-selling horror novelist has again set his keyboard on e-books. Let’s hope that the third time is the charm.

 
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