Melville House Books

Stephen King reads from his customized Kindle at the launch of Kindle 2

This fall, Stephen King and his publisher, Scribner, plan to offer 1500 autographed first editions of his new novel, Under the Dome, available on their websites for $200 apiece. Presuming they sell them all, that adds up to a cool $300,000, notes this Wall Street Journal report. “This is fighting back against the disappearance of the book as an object,” says Scribner head Susan Moldow.

Which prompts Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket copy to ask, “Who, exactly, are they fighting?”

As she goes on to observe in this post, “When Amazon announced the next-generation Kindle 2 in February, King was the only author to join Jeff Bezos on stage. He’d written a Kindle-only story, UR, which debuted with the new device (it’s since been released in audio too). King is so Kindle-friendly that instead of the standard white plastic version, Amazon made him a pink Kindle 2, to match the one that appears in UR. …. He’s written a Web-only series, novellas, serial novels, poems, essays, short stories, really big books and comic books, and welcomed film adaptations of his work.”

Says Kellogg, “… it seems Stephen King’s target is … Stephen King.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.