agrippa

[catnapcat]

An article I recently read listed Stephen King as the first popular author to publish an e-book. A bit of searching revealed that they were probably talking about Riding the Bullet, a ghost story published electronically in 2000 by Simon and Schuster

Comments

[catnapcat]

For a couple of weeks this month, I was losing my storage area network (four terabyte!) drive once a day! :-O

[drax0r]

Not only did this seem pretty recent

I've been pondering this particular point since you first posted, as somewhere in one of the dank, dusty corners of my mind a little voice was whispering something I couldn't quite make out...

This morning it hit me: Bruce Sterling

He wrote an 'Online Book' in the early 90s called _The_Hacker_Crackdown_ about teh hax0rz and law enforcement in the "digital frontier"

From the preface: "Hi, I'm Bruce Sterling, the author of this electronic book."

Based on that statement and the same amount of research and/or fact-checking that the author of your article apparently did, I will now proclaim that Bruce Sterling was not only the first popular author to publish an e-book, but he also coined the phrase. :)

[catnapcat]

Based on that statement and the same amount of research and/or fact-checking that the author of your article apparently did, I will now proclaim that Bruce Sterling was not only the first popular author to publish an e-book, but he also coined the phrase. :)

Good call! Maybe the author was referring to books whose first edition (since there are now print and audio versions of Riding the Bullet) was exclusively electronic. Hacker Crackdown (PG #101) is copyright 1992, but includes a "preface to the electronic edition" (dated 1994) which encourages you to buy the paper edition. Or maybe they're just quoting the Amazon.com review of the King book.

And I guess the jargon file (started in 1975) doesn't count, and Lewis Carroll did not choose to electronically publish Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (PG #11), though I suspect he would have thought it was cool.