Not that we're the doom-and-gloom poster children or anything, but no one ever accused us of being "too optimistic" or "not at all jaded" either. If you want consistently shiny happy commentary, you might want to look elsewhere, because as everyone knows, in soap operas you have to take the downs with the ups. See, several viewers wrote in last week taking issue with our discussion of Stephen King's latest work, Riding The Bullet, which is currently only available in an "e-book" format that's incompatible with Macs. We were accused by some of putting too negative a slant on things, particularly in light of the fact that King himself had publicly stated his intense disapproval that Mac users were shut out of reading his story. We've been assured from all corners that the situation will be fixed shortly.

Now, we at AtAT have every confidence that yes, eventually Riding The Bullet will in fact be viewable on Macs-- but we didn't feel the need to jump the gun. Sure, we've been promised a Mac-compatible version "soon," but in our experience, the word "soon" takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to promised Mac compatibility. In these situations we've found it's best to expect little and (maybe) be pleasantly surprised. That way, those inevitable disappointments aren't so tough to bear. We're certainly glad we adopted that attitude when it came to Barnes and Noble's promised platform-independent PDF version of Riding The Bullet, because otherwise we might have felt a lot more let down right about now.

So far it turns out that Barnes and Noble's promised PDF version is Pretty Darn False. Customers who signed up to receive the PDF via email instead got a notice saying that, due to overwhelming server loads, it might be a while before the file got sent out. But as faithful viewer Jim Boulter reports, when he finally got his official link to the PDF version of King's book six days later, all he found was directions to download the same still-as-yet-Mac-incompatible e-book version offered a week ago. And Jim's no fluke; a MacAddict article reports that other customers received the same bait-and-switch. So much for promises.

And is it really that surprising? King's new book is the first big title that's only available electronically and not on paper, so we find it hard to believe that the e-book people would allow the story to be released as something as easily redistributable as a PDF file; this whole stunt is meant to sell expensive e-book devices like the Rocket e-Book Pro-- hard to do with a PDF copy of the book floating around. Now we'll promptly forget all about this mythical Mac-compatible version of Riding The Bullet, read some old Clive Barker instead (in good ol' dead tree format), and be pleasantly surprised and delighted when (if?) the powers that be release a version of King's new book that all of us can enjoy.