Stephen King Surprises Libraries
Librarians weren't ready for a major e-book release
Staff -- School Library Journal, 5/1/2000
It was like a bullet fired out of nowhere. Although Stephen King's novella Riding the Bullet was received tepidly by critics, most of those writing about it seemed to pay more attention to the 66-page ghost story's format than its plot or characters. Released to the public on the Web through bn.com, Amazon.com, and similar bookseller sites on March 14, it became the first work released exclusively in electronic form by a major fiction author.
Libraries weren't ready for it at all, admitted more than a dozen library directors interviewed at the Public Library Association Conference in Charlotte, NC. Fortunately, that didn't seem to matter. "Nobody asked us for it," said director Carole Dickerson of the Lake Oswego (OR) Public Library. "I think they got it off the Web themselves if they wanted it."
"No one was ready," Mary Ellen Heinen, sales and marketing vice president for Glassbook, a company that sells e-book software that can be used to read documents like the King story. She said that the confusion brought home the need for libraries to plan to offer e-books now, not later.
Due to the manner in which Riding the Bullet was marketed on the Web, libraries did not have the ability to lend copies. The e-book company netLibrary, for example, was not able to offer the title to its library clients. Theresa Murphy of the Baltimore County (MD) Public Library said that BCPL, however, is planning to start circulating other e-books within the year, and that the system had purchased some handheld Rocket eBook readers to test. As for the King story, BCPL librarians improvised, downloading copies to each branch's Rocket reader for use in the library only.
And how were these e-book files cataloged? As "www fiction." --W. M.
