A rchive Date
[ 09-08-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
|
[The Price of Honour
By JARED KENDALL -- CNEWS Tech News
Wednesday, Aug. 09, 2000
The effort to market books online in electronic form hasn't exactly taken the literary world by storm. We might buy books online, but we don't seem too keen on the notion of reading them that way.
Stephen King is one of the highest profile supporters of e-books, and The Plant is his latest attempt to bring the sort of democratic distribution that the Web allows to the literary public.
King plans to release a story called The Plant in 5,000 to 7,000 word parts and the first piece became available from his stephenking.com http://www.stephenking.com/ site on July 24th. Readers download the installment for free, and are then on their honour to send $1 for the material. If enough readers pay for the first two installments, King will continue the story to its conclusion.
If they don't, he'll drop it quicker than a vampire carrying a cross covered in holy water.
The idea is democratic but it's also mighty expensive. Most novels are somewhere between 50,000 and 125,000 words or thereabouts. At a buck per chunk, and with each chunk running between 5,000 to 7,000 words, you could wind up paying $10 to download and read a novel's worth of the story.
What's more, this is Stephen King we're talking about. Have you read The Stand? It was somewhere in excess of 40,000 pages as I recall. You needed several strong men just to lift the hardcover edition. How much would it cost to download at these rates? A grand? More?
What I'm getting at is that the honour system is fine for something like a newspaper, after all you'd have to be a pretty loathsome individual to rob a blind newsboy just to save 50 cents. But being on my honour to pay more for a book than I'd pay for most paperbacks? Doing so when I have to use my own paper and toner if I want to print the thing out and have it in my hands? When I end up with something that I can't even sell to the used book store, or donate to the friends of the library book sale?
"I'm counting on two things," King says on his site. "The first is plain old honesty. 'Take what you want and pay for it,' as the old saying goes. The second is that you'll like the story enough to want to read more. If you do want more, you have to pay. Remember: Pay and the story rolls. Steal and the story folds. No stealing from the blind newsboy!"
I think it's spectacular that Stephen King, the epitome of the sort of writer who is doing just peachy with traditional publishing, is doing so much to support a medium that is the greatest hope for struggling, unknown authors. He even comes right out and says that helping those folks is a big part of what he's aiming for. As he puts it, "But if I could break some trail for all the midlist writers, literary writers, and just plain marginalized writers who see a future outside the mainstream, that's great."
Sure, it's great. But don't charge me more for a "floppyback" book than I'd pay for a paperback. Make the chunks longer. Make it a buck for two chunks. Or, better yet, make each chunk "pay-what-it's-worth-to-you". Let readers support the book by sending in what they thought it was worth. Once enough had paid to reach a figure King set, he could release the next chunk.
He could even keep a "fanometer" on his site to show how much cash had come in.
Shareware also operates on the honour system. You download a program and use it for free, and are then on your honour to pay for it. Most programs use a carrot and stick method: If you don't pay, the programs quit working. With The Plant, if you don't pay, the author quits writing.
But shareware is cheap. The Plant isn't. As a Stephen King story we may not be surprised by a monster that eats an arm and a leg. But paying an arm and a leg is different.
If it was any other author, I'd guarantee this venture would fail, and fail dramatically.
But this is Stephen King we're talking about. Calling his fans rabid is an understatement. If anyone can pull off charging more for an e-book than a regular one, he can do it. I'm just not sure if he should be applauded for blazing a trail, or lambasted for making it a toll road.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
|