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Stephen King's latest, "UR," is only available as an e-book. Will you buy it? This die-hard King fan is missing the boat on this one. King's agent, Ralph Vicinanza, said Tuesday that downloads have reached "five figures" after barely three weeks on the market. The release coincides with Amazon's launch of their upgraded Kindle reader.

The Kindle 2, a slimmed-down model with upgraded components and storage capacity, went on sale Feb. 9 for $359. The gadget downloads books, newspaper stories and blog posts over a wireless network.

An Associated Press story gives more details about King and Kindle 2, where King is quoted as saying about the device, "It became about the message instead of the medium, and that's the way it's supposed to be."

The e-book is a novella about a love-sick college English instructor whose ownership of a pink Kindle leads to fictional characters and events crossing over into his life. I haven't read it but this sounds to me like the book/movie Inkheart, meeting today's technology. In "Inkheart," by Cornelia Funke, the main characters "read" fictional characters and objects out of books and interact with them. 

Will "UR" be a success? In 2000, in the early years of digital texts, King's novella "Riding the Bullet" (with Simon & Schuster) was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, in the first 24 hours of its release. King went out on his own later that year and offered "The Plant" for readers to download, available by the chapter. He didn't sell the rights, not even to his longtime publishers at Simon & Schuster. King said that if 75 percent of those who download "The Plant" pay him, he would continue doing installments until the novel was complete. However, King shelved the project in December after turning out six installments. He said on his Web site that the "fascinating little adventure" netted US $463,832.27.

This time, "UR" is being sold as a complete novella, complete with product placement. Time will tell how fans react. So far, they are eating it up.