Biting the Bullet on the World Wide Web

By Paul Takushi, UC Davis Bookstore

When I was asked to write a review of the new Stephen King novel, "Riding The Bullet," and to comment on the experience of reading a novel on the Web, my immediate reaction was, "Ugh."

Let me clarify a few things. I'm the fiction buyer at the UC Davis Bookstore and a strong proponent of the written word as it appears on actual paper in a non-virtual book. This stance does not come from a fear of overwhelming competition from Web books or any other economic reasons. I just love the tactile sensation of a book in my hands or on my lap: the texture and smell of the paper, turning the pages and gauging my progress by the distance between my bookmark and the back cover, the heft of a hardback, its ease of portability. I'd hate to see this format diminish with an increase in the popularity of Web books. So, it was with much trepidation that I began my assignment.

Day One
Since I'm not a big fan of online bookstores, I decided to check out the official Web site for Riding the Bullet (http://www.ridingthebullet.com/). The page downloaded fairly quickly via an ethernet connection on my iMac. At the bottom of the page was the admonition: " Web TV users note that you are currently unavailable to download the book as it requires a hard drive to download the information to." OK, no problem there. Then I encountered this: "Macintosh users are also in the unfortunate position that they can indeed download the book, but there are no viewers available for their platform yet. Support for the Macintosh will be coming shortly." Gee, I guess I can't get it here.

My next step was a reluctant visit to the empire of Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/). Amazon.com is giving the novel away because they have many investors who aren't worried about frivolous concepts like profit, and they want the entire planet to eventually beat a virtual path to their virtual doorstep. Amazon.com had a solution for Mac users: download Adobe Acrobat Reader and read the novel as a PDF file. The download went smoothly and took about five minutes. I went back to the Amazon.com page and hit "Download E-book now." What appeared next is the bane of a computer user's existence: an error message. So I emailed tech support at Amazon.com for help.

Day Two
Twenty-four hours later I still didn't have an answer from Amazon.com so I went to the Barnes&Noble site (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/). No luck there either. At the Barnes&Noble site you need a Rocket eBook device (yet another electronic device that marketers are telling us we "can't live without") to capture the download.

Next, I contacted a friend who is actively employed as a computer guru by a few departments on campus. He ran into the same problem on three different computers but was finally able to get the book on a PC. Unfortunately, he couldn't email me the book since there was embedded encryption in the PDF file that would not allow this heinous crime to be committed. BUT THE BOOK WAS FREE TO BEGIN WITH!

Day Three
Two days after my original request for help, I received a form email from tech support at Amazon.com telling me to not worry and to just follow the download instructions at Adobe. I guess they didn't read the part in my original email that told them that reading PDFs from other sites wasn't a problem, that the problem was getting the PDF from Amazon.com itself. I decided to approach IT here on campus.

Day Four
The IT folks I contacted gave me a quick reply and steered me toward a different page at Amazon.com that seemed to address the problem. It didn't. The same error message came up. After four days of trying to get this "book," I felt an uneasy mix of frustration and relief: frustration with the process (is this what parents went through last Christmas when they tried to get a Furbie, or was it a Tickle-Me-Elmo, for their kids?) and relief that this whole venture seemed like a death-knell for e-books.

Day Six
Success! After consulting with various experts over the last few days, I decided to try my own long-standing method of figuring things out on my own: I began looking into every window on the menu bar until I found something that looked odd. The Weblink Preference on my Acrobat Reader was preset to an application called Charcoal (and I thought Charcoal was just a font). So I reset the preference to Netscape Communicator and voila--the download and file worked perfectly. As the adrenaline level settles back to normal in my system, I begin reading. . . .

And Now for a Good Read
First impressions: size of page, and thereby font, is adjustable. This is good.

I haven't figured out if you can set a bookmark, which is maddening if you don't write down the page number somewhere. I haven't figured out if you can advance, or go back, to a certain page--also maddening when you open the file again and you're at Page 1 AGAIN.

Oh yes. What did I think of the story? It is funny, gory, macabre, and introspective--like the long version of a scary story you'd hear at summer camp, or from your nutty uncle during a fishing trip, or from your tripped-out friend at the end of a late-night party. Now, if only I could get it in print....