Stephen King was a pioneer of electronic publishing. He serialized his novel The Plant online, and his novel Riding the Bullet was one of the first mass-market e-books. So it's kind of fascinating that he's turning away from e-books now that they've finally become ubiquitous. His next novel, the supernatural mystery Joyland, will only be available as a paperback at first, with no electronic edition until some point later on.


Image via Firewireblog.

Joyland is coming out from Titan Books' pulpy Hard Case Crime imprint, and King is keen for people to experience it in the proper paperback format:

I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts. That combo made Hard Case Crime the perfect venue for this book, which is one of my favourites. I also loved the paperbacks I grew up with as a kid, and for that reason, we're going to hold off on e-publishing this one for the time being.


You could argue that the latter-day equivalent of those pulpy paperbacks actually is the e-book, especially when so many "guilty pleasures" books are becoming hits on the Kindle first and then later crossing over to print. So this is a weirdly retrograde decision on King's part — and no doubt means that badly OCR-ed electronic copies will be all over the net the day after the paperback comes out.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Joyland is about