Report: Amazon scares up Stephen King for Kindle
When Amazon.com hosts its anticipated Monday morning e-book event, one of the highlights could be an exclusive deal for the Kindle with horror story master Stephen King.
The Amazon event, taking place at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, is widely expected to feature the unveiling of a next-generation Kindle e-book reader. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon also will say it has acquired a new work by King that would be exclusively for the Kindle.
The Journal says a Kindle-like device is a factor in the story. The work by King might later be published in physical book form by Scribner, King's current publisher. (Scribner is an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS, whose CBS Interactive unit is the publisher of CNET News.)
This wouldn't be King's first tech-related effort. During the dot-com boom, the best-selling author posted chapters of a serial novel, The Plant, on the Internet in a bid to see if readers would pay voluntarily for what they were reading. He suspended the work in late 2000 after the sixth installment.
An earlier Internet-publishing foray by King, Riding the Bullet, was a case study in Internet piracy.
Jonathan Skillings is managing editor of CNET News, based in the Boston bureau. He's been with CNET since 2000, after a decade in tech journalism at the IDG News Service, PC Week, and an AS/400 magazine. He's also been a soldier and a schoolteacher. E-mail Jon. 
I like the fact that all these books occupy no physical space and are available years down the road if I care to read them again.
I also have an iPhone, but I'd never read on that. The screen is too small and the battery too minimal given the backlit screen (not an issue for Kindle).