Stephen King, Ready for Download

For an über-best-selling author of good old-fashioned books, Stephen King has always seen the promise inherent in the Internet. It’s a medium designed to get as much content to as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. And there are few people who have as much content as King. In 2000, he debuted his novella Riding the Bullet exclusively on the Web; more than 400,000 downloads were recorded in the first 24 hours. At the time it was a staggering number. This month, King is dipping his toe into the Internet yet again. To promote Just After Sunset — his first volume of short stories in six years — King’s publisher, Scribner, has teamed up with Marvel Comics and CBS Mobile to produce and distribute an online comic adaptation of a previously unreleased story from the collection.

Running at two minutes per “episode” until Aug. 29 (for a total running time of about 50 minutes), N. is accessible through its website (nishere.com), available for purchase at iTunes and Amazon, and even downloadable to cell phones — ironic, given that in King’s recent novel Cell, the mobile-phone network became a conduit for a global pandemic. The experiment is an example of the kind of outside-the-box thinking that publishers have had to engage in to try to reverse a steep decline in readers.  Read more…

This entry was posted on August 15, 2008 at 7:27 am and is filed under Movies, TIMES and more. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.