Stories about: Simon & Schuster

Unless you've been sleeping as soundly as a princess for the past six months, it'd be impossible not to notice that summer 2000 was the season the electronic book finally barged into public consciousness like a battering ram. Publishing's dream boy Stephen King, himself newly packaged following a near-fatal car accident that shattered his right leg, started the assault this spring. Simon & Schuster Inc. released King's Riding the Bullet as an e-book, making it available in a digital form online (an e-book is the encrypted, digitized contents of a book, from jacket image to index). More than 500,000 copies of the novella were snapped up in a day by the author's notoriously rabid fans, e-book enthusiasts and just plain bargain hunters (reportedly, as many as 300,000 free copies were distributed). Simon & Schuster, apparently pleased enough with those numbers, announced it would make all of suspense novelist Mary Higgins Clark's 22 mysteries available electronically just a week after striking a US$64 million deal to publish four of her new works. Then in July King upped the ante, self-publishing on his website Chapter 1 of a new novel, The Plant, saying future chapters would be available if readers paid $1 per installment.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em--the "dead tree" publishers who fear the competition of electronic books are now going wholeheartedly digital. A selection of titles to be published as e-books is now part of the season's catalog at leading publisher Simon & Schuster.

The commonly held assumption about e-books is that many customers won't use them until elements of the interface - such as screen quality and annotation - improve. Read a book on a screen? Most people would rather file their tax returns.

Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. Monday announced a partnership to deliver electronic books online. Amazon plans to open an online e-book store, offering consumers the chance to buy and download paperless books using a customized version of the Microsoft Reader e-book format. After years of maintaining a strangely distant relationship, the two Seattle-area companies are finally doing business together.

The Web phenomenon known as Stephen King has roared into the headlines again, drawing eager fans and even more eager media to his Web site for the second installment of his serial novel, The Plant.

SYSTEMS FLYING BLIND By Phil Scott Since the middle of the 20th century, when someone first dragged a radar receiver to an airport control tower, pilots have been taking orders from the ground. "Controllers tell pilots where traffic is, and they tell them to speed up, slow down and to turn," says Amy Pritchett, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Industrial and Systems Engineering in Atlanta. "Typically, pilots have been unable to know exactly where and how they fit into the traffic flow."

From Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier by Robert Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen. Copyright 1999 by Robert Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen. Reprinted by permission of Free Press/Simon & Schuster.

Time Warner Trade Publishing will kick off an online publishing venture in the first quarter of next year, with the intent of attracting readers, authors and editors interested in fiction and nonfiction written specifically for the Internet.

In their spare time they code Oracle Corp. database applications and build websites. They've been surfing the web since there was a web. They're as comfortable with technology as Michael Jordan is with a basketball.

Lori Thompson is frustrated with contact management software. It's not that Thompson, the senior vice president of sales at the Keds division of Stride Rite Corp., doesn't recognize the importance of organizing sales calls and client data. It's just this: The fact that her IT department made it available shows its lack of understanding about what salespeople and marketers really need to do their jobs.