The book in question was Hearts in Atlantis, Mr. King's paean to that mythical period called the '60s. It's a brilliant work, one that I highly recommend, but that's not the reason for this article.

You see, a week or so after I download Hearts, Stephen King stunned the publishing world by releasing a short story, Riding the Bullet, as an ebook, and as an ebook only. For the first time in history, a major author chose to release a new work (of this length) exclusively in electronic form, and people responded in droves. Amazon, who was offering the book free of charge, had server problems, and numerous customers were turned away. Barnes & Noble was also giving the book away free, if only for the first day. However, for those of us who have the pleasure of using a Palm device, there is only one real vendor: Peanut Press at http://www.peanutpress.com. For $2.50, Peanut Press is offering Riding the Bullet, shown in Figure A, in both Palm OS and Windows CE formats for reading on those respective devices. PalmPower's Donna Rose had no problems purchasing, downloading, and installing the ebook on her Palm V.

FIGURE A


Stephen King is the first major author to release a work of this length exclusively as an ebook. Roll over picture for a larger image.

A unique reading experience
I've become a huge fan of ebooks, and the technology supporting them is getting so good, they may just change reading as we know it. That's not to say there aren't matters to be resolved before some politician starts promising "an ebook in every palm." Nope. There are still issues surrounding the encryption technology in use, book selection, and device standards. Let's look at each of these issues in turn.

Hackers at the gate
Security. This is a major issue, and probably the most difficult of the lot. The reality is that hackers are out there just waiting for the next encrypted process to be released, and the time between release and a crack is getting incredibly short. For example, it was mere days after the release of Riding the Bullet that stories started to surface about the book being hacked and posted for free on a number of sites. Hackers break these things because they can. It gives them a rush to break the code and to be first to do it. I'm sure that as the news leaked out that Riding the Bullet had been cracked, dozens of sweat-soaked, bleary-eyed hackers out there let out a groan of disappointment that they hadn't completed the hack first.