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Report: Amazon scares up Stephen King for Kindle

Along with what's expected to be the debut of an updated e-book reader, <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> says the online retailer has an exclusive deal with the novelist.

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Jon Skillings Director of copy editing
A born browser of dictionaries and a lifelong New Englander, Jon Skillings is director of copy editing at CNET. He honed his language skills as a US Army linguist (Polish and German) before diving into editing tech publications back when the web was just getting under way. He writes occasionally, on topics from GPS to James Bond.
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  • 30 years experience at tech and consumer publications, print and online. Five years in the US Army as a translator (German and Polish).
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Jon Skillings

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.

Amazon Kindle

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.

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