Print is dead, or so they keep telling us. And we're inclined to agree; after all, why tote around a cheap, durable paperback or newspaper when you can read the same content on the breakable screen of an expensive, battery-chewing electronic device? Don't get us wrong, we're no Luddites on this matter. If we were fundamentally opposed to the electronic distribution of information, AtAT wouldn't exist and you'd be reading the back of your cereal box right now. It's just that certain frustrating experiences tell us that there's always going to be a need for hard copy. Trying to read Joyce on a Newton screen? Not much fun-- and no cracks from the philistines about the medium being irrelevant when discussing the enjoyability of Ulysses. Also, while you can whip a paperback copy of Dante's Inferno against a brick wall six or eight times with no particular loss of legibility, we know from painful experience that a single four-foot drop onto a hardwood floor is all it takes to send a Palm V off to the repair shop for a couple of weeks.

So while we're not ready to bury the print medium just yet, we'd have to consider Stephen King's latest novel another nail in the coffin. King's latest work, Riding The Bullet, is the first mass-market book only available in "e-book" format. Which means if you own an e-book, you can get Riding The Bullet for a mere $2.50. Of course, the Rocket e-Book Pro itself will set you back $269, it weighs 22 ounces, and we're more than a little skeptical that it'd survive a four-foot drop onto a hard surface. Count us out for now. We consider this "e-only" policy a shame, because it means we won't be able to pick this title up in a used paperback store sometime down the line and read it in the tub, secure in the knowledge that if we were to fall asleep, we'd be out a whopping buck and a quarter. (Whereas falling asleep in the tub while reading an eBook would set us back a couple hundred dollars and probably reinforce old lessons about what happens when water meets electricity.)

Worse yet, as faithful viewer Michael Kaplan laments, while a piece of software called Glassbook lets people read e-books on their Wintel computers, no such beast exists for the Mac yet. So even if you want to read Riding The Bullet on your iBook, you're out of luck; even King himself isn't too thrilled about that. Scott Dailey pointed out a Boston Globe article in which King calls himself a "dedicated and long-term Mac user" and says he's disappointed with the e-book format's current Mac-unfriendliness. We've received reports that Barnes And Noble's web site allowed visitors to sign up to receive a PDF copy of the story via email, but if that offer ever existed, it doesn't seem to be there now. Oh, well... Guess we'll have to dredge up an old paperback copy of Skeleton Crew instead. At least we won't have to worry about the financial ramifications of accidentally leaving it behind in the Food Court at the mall...