By daybreak, both giants were swamped with orders–more than 2.5 per second–and by the weekend some customers were still waiting. But more Web-savvy fans got “Bullet” easily for the suggested retail price of $2.50 at smaller e-tailers like Powells.com, or on such tiny sites as Members.Tripod .com/~Charnelhouse/, run by a 25-year-old Quincy, Mass., King fan named Kevin Quigley. By last weekend, he’d moved about 400, keeping 50 cents per sale. (Brace yourself, Kevin; we just gave out your URL.) In all, more than half a million readers have (or will soon have) a text that was a file on Stephen King’s hard drive a month ago. In nonvirtual publishing, it would’ve taken six to nine.
So what did book people learn? First, just how much juice Stephen King has, especially among Webheads. They learned the technology needs tweaking; it shouldn’t take long to beef up overloaded server farms. They know it costs less to zap digits than to ship books, and that in one version of the future nobody’s going to be able to tell a publisher from a retailer from an author–but they knew that already. And what do they think? Steve Riggio, head of Barnesandnoble.com, believes it’s “the liberation of publishing. With a keystroke, it’s a worldwide market, no trucks, no printers, no publicity departments. It’s friction-free. If anybody doesn’t think that’s exciting, they really should return to the 19th century.” (Or whichever century that just was.) Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon thinks it’s a crock: “I don’t see any revolution, and anyone who does is a fool. Why would anyone pay for software to display something that’s readily available? Nowadays you don’t have to go more than five steps before running into some sort of bookstore.” That sounds right, until you think of those half-million downloaders, each with a credit-card number. So the wheels are turning. “Now that we’ve discovered there’s something out there,” says S&S chief Jack Romanos, “what’s the second act? Nobody knows. And we’re going to have to figure it out real quick.”
