King kicks e-publishing into touch: "Stephen King has shown just how difficult the electronic publishing game is and now it seems the industry is in turmoil. Nobody seems to know which way to turn, how to tackle this fantastically bad publicity or even how to pretend it never mattered." Why are people treating this as a failure of electronic publishing, when really, it was a test of volunteer payments? To my mind, that is what failed. The problem wasn't a lack of demand for the material, just too low of a percentage of the downloaders were coughing up the dough. No telling what would have happened if he'd have made them pay their $1 up-front. That may not have worked either, but one should take this experiment for what it actually tested.