Stephen King Forgoing an eBook Release for Joyland

Steve Barton   |  

May 23, 2013

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The news that eBook pioneer Stephen King is opting out of releasing his upcoming Joyland in eBook form, instead throwing his support behind brick-and-mortar booksellers, is surprising. A change of heart from the man who stood onstage with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to introduce the Kindle 2?

“I have no plans for a digital version,” King told the Wall Street Journal. “In the meantime let people stir their sticks and go to an actual bookstore rather than a digital one.”

The author made the opposite decision in 2000, when his 16,000-word story “Riding the Bullet” was released exclusively as an eBook, and he has since released three more stories as Kindle Singles, as well as a nonfiction essay “Guns” in the wake of the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. It’s currently ranked fourth in the Thin Reads list of Kindle Single sales.

As you’d expect, the announcement has been warmly received by bookstores, which have been hurt by the lower price of eBooks, sales of which are up across the board according to The LA Times.

But don’t count King out of the digital game just yet. You have to think Doctor Sleep will be made available in the format, especially since an excerpt will appear in the eBook version of The Shining from Knopf, out August 27th.

Synopsis:
Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line of pulp-styled crime novels published by Titan Books, will release Joyland, a new novel by Stephen King, on June 4, 2013. Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.

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