Full Details
08
26
2011
Stephen King Goes Treeless
Stephen King is the third most nominated author in the WWEnd database. Like a lot of authors, he has embraced the new digital book industry with gusto. Now we find that his latest short story, Mile 81, will only be available with ebook retailers. Is this a trend? Are book anthologies and industry magazines, like Analog, Asimov’s and Clarkesworld, facing new competition from individual authors? With the recent announcement of Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine now offering a free bi-monthly digest, I’d guess yes.
The brief description that Scribner released evokes memories of Christine: "Mile 81 is the chilling story of an insatiable car and a heroic kid whose worlds collide at an abandoned rest stop on the Maine Turnpike."
5 Comments
Perhaps I’m being too doomsdayish, but I’m afraid our growing dependance on ebooks will one day result in the Library of Alexandria of the digital age…fire and all.
Suddenly, Bradbury’s "Fahrenheit 451" appears very dated 🙂 A spoor of fatalism forces agreement with @whargoul. A nuclear blast can burn out electronic circuits.
Maybe I am old fashioned, but I still prefer a physical book over an ebook. I have a kindle account, and I do buy ebooks on it. But, I will never stop buying physical copies of what I like to keep in my personal library. There’s just a certain level of awesomeness that you feel when you walk in to an old library and smell that book smell in the air. Makes me feel like I just stepped in to a fantasy world of endless possibilities.
@ Emil, to my understanding you don’t need a warhead. You just need an emp pulse. Frankly it will be interesting to see just how long we go without an emp pulse war or terrorist attack.
I have always assumed that there was enough redundancy built in to the internet that most digital information would survive EMPs, assuming the attacks were localized. It would take a global wipeout of information to make digital storage (on the cloud) useless. Recent efforts to duplicate storage in the moon (underground, where no space based EMP could affect it) seem well suited to avoiding such a catastrophe.Even if such an event were possible, I suspect whatever cataclysm might be sufficiently large to produce such a pulse would also effectively burn paper.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.