One step forward, Two steps back for e-books

One step forward and two steps back this week. Starting with the steps back, Thomson Multimedia unveiled two e-book readers to replace the Rocket eBook this week at New York Is Book Country in the Big Apple. The less expensive of the two machines is about $50 more than its predecessor! And it can be upgraded to cost around $700. So instead of making e-books more affordable, Thomson has actually managed to make them less so. And what happened to that big ad campaign that GemStar promised? I haven't seen anything. Has anyone? GemStar licensed Thomson to create a reader to replace the Rocket e-Book and the SoftBook Reader. The SoftBook Reader was too expensive to begin with. One can only imagine what the new improved version will cost! Now to be fair the new version has got some added advantages like a built in modem. (See my article of a couple of months ago for a complete description). Publishers had been hoping for less expensive machines to make their books more affordable. As it is now, the Rocket editions of books are the highest priced in the store. The new, more expensive reader is not going to help them sell. Next, it looks like we're only going to get two chapters of "The Plant" from Stephen King. Word has it that downloads of the second chapter haven't been as numerous as expected and whether or not 75% of the readers are paying is not an issue. It seems that the book just isn't catching the interest of King's readers. To be honest, I read the first chapter and it didn't inspire me to bother with the second. There are reasons why publishers don't publish books, even books by sure-to-sell authors. They just aren't very good sometimes. "The Plant" is an old book, written in the style of the Stephen King who wrote "Carrie" (not a good book, by my opinion). It lacks narrative and character development. As "Carrie" was written in the form of a number of newspaper reports, "The Plant" is a series of memos. With no real characters, it is difficult to care about the book or the plot. I said that this might be a great publicity stunt for King and Simon and Schuster. After having read the first chapter, I doubt if you will ever see it in print. King writes too well and too much for Simon and Schuster to bother with this story. Again, there are books shouldn't be published, this is one of them.

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