Too much is being made of Stephen King's Joyland going print-only. So his
initial run will be paper-exclusive, intended to help bookstores and accentuate some
nostalgia for the pulp presses that inspired his detective novel. He is now
being misquoted as thinking e-books aren't real books and decried as a luddite.
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| She really wanted to read it on that camera. |
This outrage is nonsense. King didn't say e-books aren't
real books, and he's moving with only one of the three titles he's
publishing this year. It's not a trend, not an attack on your device, and
because King didn't sell you your e-reader, you're not entitled to his works on
it. I type this as though almost anyone has read all of the books he's published on Kindle.
Remember: this is a Stephen King joint. There are at least
fifty of those available on e-readers, so if you're really jonesing for unread King on
June 4th, and just can't envision reading one any other way than off
a screen, I guarantee you there is one already on that service you haven't read
yet. His sons also just published two novels on it this year. Wait a few months
and King himself will release Doctor
Sleep on all those lovely devices. There are already a myriad of authors
you can only read on the Kindle, and soon there may well be legal Stephen King fan fiction for you to buy too.
That you'll have to wait a bit longer for a digital version
of this newness is perhaps a nuisance on a platform already overflowing
with cheaply priced content. It'd only be alarming if you feared
that this would begin a trend in publishing. If you rely on your e-reader
primarily or exclusively, you want books to keep hitting that thing. That? That I dig.
But it's not a trend. Stephen King is a nutty edge-case in
publishing whose "The Plant" preceded the e-market so greatly it
bombed for lack of an audience, who just published "Guns," an exclusive Kindle Single, and
who waved a pink Kindle on stage for Jeff Bezos. He writes so much that he can
pledge something like UR to one
market for a while, and that's what he's doing with Joyland. King does this kind of stuff. J.K. Rowling, Suzanne
Collins and James Patterson won't follow – in fact, across their careers, their
works have marched toward the digital. If you're in it for the money or to
reach the most people, you want to hit all formats.
No one's going to follow suit, either, because book stores
don't have the profits to lobby, and because this probably won't help them
much. Amazon.com already has a massive platform for heavily discounted paper
books. And Joyland is going to show
up in Wal-Marts and Targets, which will undercut the price bookstores can
profit on. And soon thereafter, it'll be scanned, torrented and pirated onto every device you want. It's not going to work. It's not going to be a trend. Your digital
future is safe.
Want to be pissed about something in publishing this week?
How about Emily Giffin's husband stirring up her fans until they phoned a death threat to a reviewer?
I am more than pissed off about the death threats. Truly offensive behaviour.
ReplyDeleteI cannot fathom managing to touch so many people with my writing, unifying them around the pleasure they get from it, and turning that into such an offensive negative.
DeleteNo outrage here. Stephen King is an outlier; what he does or doesn't do has little bearing on the average author.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand why anyone would be so upset about Stephen King's decision here. For crying out loud, I'm not even an avid fan and I'm fully aware that he's a bit on the eccentric side. And so what if he wants to reach out to bookstore owners and give them a nod? I don't know him, and I won't claim to, but he strikes me as the sort that would look at it as an opportunity to thank them for recommending his books for all these years.
ReplyDeleteNow, the Emily Giffin thing? I read that whole blog post you linked yesterday. THAT was atrocious. I'm still fuming about it. =/
The Giffin story is one of the few things that managed to shush my empathy and turn me into a rage monster. I lost my cool for a while.
DeleteFor the last couple years, I've bought only eBooks, nearly all of them indie titles. The only traditional title I'm likely to buy in the near future is Throne of the Crescent Moon. So even if Joyland was Kindle-exclusive, Kindle-first, or just Kindle-optional, I probably wouldn't have bought it anyway.
ReplyDeleteSeems like, every week, we're treated to a new episode of Authors Behaving Badly. I understand the temptation, but the counter-examples are enough to keep me from doing stuff like that myself. I hope. :-P
King certainly broke new ground with The Plant. To my knowledge he is the only established author who has ever sold his fans half a story and then walked away from it.
ReplyDeleteI think what King is doing makes perfect sense... vintage story idea, vintage cover - why the heck would he e-book it?
ReplyDeleteYeah, that Emily-thing. I had never heard of her before. After reading that debacle, I will never buy her books.
Wow, way to miss the point, reading public!
ReplyDeleteI think it's beautiful that King is creating a book/artifact that harkens back to the golden age of pulp. If people don't get that's it's a book/artifact and not just a bunch of text, then they don't deserve to read it. Truly.
That's like whining the Griffin and Sabine books look crappy on e-ink readers.
Holy crap, just followed the link about the death threats. And I review books! *locks door*
ReplyDeleteHoly crap, I need to find out about the death threats.
ReplyDeleteThis entry of yours was actually worthy of the OP-ED page of the NY Times. I mean that as a compliment. I don't use the word trenchant very often. However you wrote a trenchant and very enjoyable, thoughtful post here.
As for my feelings about Stephen King, they are very mixed up. I used to read everything he wrote, up to my thirties. Then I stopped. Don't know why but I must have thought I had something more important to do.
My most entertaining memory concerning Stephen King was watching an SNL skit on him in the 1970's , where someone was pretending to BE him, and was typing a mile a minute on an old fashioned typewriter. Suddenly for a split-second, the actor stopped typing abruptly and said, "Oh my God! I've got WRITERS BLOCK!" and just as suddenly resumed typing ferociously quickly while saying, "Glad THAT'S over!!!" hah! jean xox
The only problem I have with the decision to have the book released in "print only" is that the nearest bookstore where I have any hope of finding Stephen King books is about 100 kilometers from where we live. Ordering by mail is so tedious... sigh. I guess I will just wait for it to go digital or give it a miss altogether.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I have nominated your blog for some awards. The link to the specific blog post that involves the awards is Bames Live
World is wild, whatever you talk about! Maybe I'm just intolerant these days, but I'm sure everybody can decide what he or she wants for himself or herself!
ReplyDelete