Stephen King Novel Downloads Break Records

Internet distribution of The Plant, the new novel by
Stephen King, topped 100,000 completed downloads in its first two
days of online sales, Conxion, the Internet operator handling the
e-book, announced.

The download, the firm said, was a record for King's work, and a
respectable figure for the digital delivery of books.

Antonio Salerno, Conxion's CEO, said that King has become a
pioneering author in digitally delivering his books directly to
readers.

Conxion said that King's customers, even on modem connections, are
able to receive the book within two minutes and customers on
broadband receive the installments within 15 seconds.

The download, the firm said, is being delivered in one 145 kilobyte
file in order to put less stress on customers' computing systems.

When King released a novella called "Riding the Bullet" over the
Internet last March, Conxion said that customers had problems
downloading the single large, encrypted file, which resulted in a
high volume of aborted downloads.

This time, however, King agreed to eliminate the encryption and
created a smaller file size.

Salerno said that his firm is accustomed to shipping five to 100
megabyte (MB) files routinely from customers to their users, adding
that by compressing the e-book down to such a small size, despite the
volume of downloads, there was minimal impact on the company's
Internet backbone.

Conxion's Web site is at http://www.conxion.com.

Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com.