IUniverse.com CEO Richard Tam concurs. "The current industry perpetuates this myth that if a book is rejected by them then it must be because of quality. In fact, most of those books are rejected because of economics. They don't know how to publish a book if it only sells, say, 10,000 copies. Their current economic model doesn't work"

Literary agent Richard Curtis, who plans to launch a new retail Web site called E-Reads this spring, sees a huge gap that companies such as iUniverse.com could potentially fill. "The 1,000- to 10,000-copy authors don't attract attention the way they used to. The smartest minds in the world just haven't been able to do it. [Print] publishers just cannot make a living publishing two books and taking one back."

Curtis is referring to the book industry's standard practice of accepting "returns." Booksellers order a number of copies of each title and are permitted to return them to the publisher for a full refund if the books don't sell. On-demand printing makes this costly and increasing untenable policy obsolete, and to literary idealists it promises a future in which no book ever need go out of print.

As large publishers catch on to on-demand publishing, they may save themselves a bundle of cash and many bushels of returns. "In the past publishers would have had to print thousands of copies to make it economically justifiable," says Random House chief spokesman Stuart Applebaum.

(With conventional book printing and binding methods, the cost of an individual book goes down as the total number of copies printed goes up. As a result, to price single copies reasonably, publishers need to order a substantial "print run.") "Now they can print hundreds of copies and drop-ship. So suddenly everything's in good shape."

But for all their Utopian promise, publishers who offer print-on-demand books aren't really publishing electronic books; iUniverse titles are only available on paper, even if the ink is barely dry. Real e-books like "Riding the Bullet" present their own set of problems, as MightyWord.com's remarks about the "comfort and convenience" of printing out e-matter suggests.

"Riding the Bullet" is only available in a format that prevents it from being printed out, so King fans have had to read the novella on their PCs, their Palm Pilots or other PDAs or an "electronic reader" like NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook or the SoftBook Reader. Readers are notoriously and vocally resistant to reading long documents on a screen, so it's no coincidence that the big crossover eBook of 2000 was a story that, if printed as a paperback book, would only be 66 pages long.

It's hard to imagine anyone reading all 1,153 pages of King's magnum opus, "The Stand," on a PC or laptop -- let along printing the thing out on a laser printer and hauling all those loose pages around. "The platforms need to be resolved for these books to have popularity," says Michael J. Wolf, the managing partner in charge of Booz, Allen & Hamilton's media and entertainment consultancy group and author of "The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Companies Are Transforming Our Lives."

Until manufacturers solve the tricky problem of providing readers with a comfortable and convenient device for reading e-books, shorter works will probably dominate the fledgling e-book market. In that case, MightyWords.com has a head start and is aggressively pursuing a niche that once belonged to magazines. In an era when writers often feel that magazines won't accommodate in-depth articles and essays, a publisher like MightyWords.com provides an attractive alternative.

For fiction writers, it may even appear to be a godsend. A master of the long short story such as Alice Munro or a novelist like Arundhati Roy, who recently penned essays protesting the Indian government's dam and irrigation projects and its testing of nuclear arms, could well find a suitable publisher in a company like MightyWords.com. "For an author of short stories, I may ask myself why I should bother with a magazine," says Chuck Verrill. "And why should I be buried in ads?"

Of course, many established writers (some of whom don't even have e-mail) find new technologies as bewildering and daunting as do their most timid readers. Electronic publishers seeking to woo name writers away from the cozy and prestigious medium of paper and cardboard may find the talent more resistant than anyone else. Stephen King is the first of them to venture into this new territory, but in terms of marquee literary attractions, the trail is still being blazed. Still, there are those fat royalties beckoning. "It's going to be years until electronic books have the wide approval to be able to replace paper books," says Wolf. "But it does provide the specter of an author saying, 'Well, I'll do it myself.'"

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