And from another blog (
http://rockscissorsblog.blogspot.com... writes name):
Quote:
Back in December of 2002, I wrote an email message to the Ebook Community neatly summarizing those problems in response to someone else's inquiry. It went like this:
Oh, god. The Plant. Don't get me started.
Stephen King couldn't have made his project more ridiculous if he'd been intentionally trying to give ebooks a high-profile failure to make up for the success of "Riding the Bullet". The Plant expressly ignored several key ways ebooks differ from treebooks, for no other real reason than King thought they should work that way.
# Download of different formats of the same chapter was counted as separate, different downloads and expected to be compensated as such. What?! A download is not a non-renewable resource...and if someone downloaded one format and just did the conversion himself (as he is entitled to by fair use), he'd have the same result and save his money. King compared the practice of multiple download to saying "Since I have the hardcover, you should give me the paperback free." That was totally missing the point.
# "Success," and thus continuation of the project was based on what percentage of the downloads people paid for. This set an impossibly high goal, and it's not any wonder that sooner or later he failed to meet it. What should have been done was set a specific numerical or monetary goal, not unlike the Street Performer Protocol, and continue once that was met.
# By tying "success" to percentage of download paid for, King also set it up so that anyone with a grudge against him or his readers could ensure that the project was not "successful," simply by writing a script to download the episodes a zillion times without paying for them. That's why on-line polls are so mistrusted—they're so easy to rig. Any script kiddie could have done the same thing with King.
In the end, the percentage of paid downloads fell below King's "success" bar, and he called the project a "failure" and terminated it unfinished—thus putting a black mark on the face of epubbing that may take a while to clean off. But even so, it's worth noting King took in hundreds of thousands of dollars for only writing half a book. Maybe that's not much by the standards of a megasuccess like King, but most other authors would have been dancing in the streets if one of their books made them even one hundred grand.
And so King shelved the book, and it cast a pall over the entire ebook industry. If such a famous author couldn't "successfully" sell a serial ebook, then the market must just not be "ready" yet. ($463,832 profit. I wish I could "fail" like that!) It was not the only reason the Storyteller's Bowl remained empty, but it was probably the biggest one.
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Seems to me to be good and convincing points.