It took a contemporary master of macabre thrillers to awaken the media and public to the existence of e-books. This spring, with great fanfare, Simon & Schuster brought out a novella by Stephen King called Riding the Bullet-the first work by a best-selling author released exclusively for electronic publication, to be read only on computerized screens, not paper. King's stunt made headlines and magazine covers, and the tsunami of demand for downloads of this e-book crashed Web sites and traditional publishing assumptions.

But the future of e-books may have less to do with Stephen King than with Eric Rowe and other less well-known authors. Rowe is a British potter who lives in the South of France, drawn there by the region's clays and minerals, which have been mined for stoneware since Roman times. To help ceramists in other areas unearth their own raw materials, he wrote A Potter's Geology. But he couldn't find a book publisher in England for his manuscript. This was just too specialized a topic for a publisher in any one country. Still, Rowe was certain that there would be interest in his book from potters everywhere.