The first e-book to catch my attention was 'The Plant' at Stephen King's website. I downloaded the first couple of chapters, which were free at the time, and I had fun reading them. When it came time for me to start paying for installments I fell off, not because I didn't want to spend two bucks but rather because I always have too much to read anyway and I didn't feel motivated to fill out yet another annoying credit card form. Still, I *almost* paid for it. And this was the most time I'd invested in reading Stephen King since 'The Stand' when I was a kid. So overall I'd say my first experience with e-books was pleasant and painless.

A couple of weeks ago I tried my second e-book, a review copy of Jack Kerouac's 'Orpheus Emerged.' This is a previously unpublished story from Kerouac's formative years, produced in a lively multimedia format by an electronic publisher called Live Reads. While Stephen King's novel was presented in austere, dignified black-and-white, this book is a colorful, highly designed hypertext experience. I'm not tremendously excited by this particular story, which is in the same collegiate hyperintellectual vein as Kerouac's first novel, 'The Town and the City'. But I like the idea of Kerouac in e-book form, and I like what the publisher did to liven up this work. I also enjoyed toying around with the Adobe E-Book Reader as I read. After I was done I found a nice pile of free classic novels, poetry books and non-fiction works, among other things, at the Adobe E-Book Library. A free library of classics is a nice touch, and I think it's smart for publishers to keep giving away e-books to help readers get comfortable with the concept. I'm looking forward to what comes next.

Back to traditional formats -- here are a few new things worth checking out:

3. The Bop Apocalypse is a study of the religious significance of the Beat Generation. A long overdue topic!

4. So George W. Bush is going to be president. Well, I don't dislike him nearly as much as I disliked his father. Not yet, anyway. And so far he's saying some decent things about bipartisanship and reaching beyond divisive party boundaries -- and maybe he'll actually deliver on this. But just in case he doesn't -- a refresher course in political dissent couldn't hurt, and there is no better place to start than the recently republished Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman.

5. Beat poetry and punk rock may not seem to have a lot in common. But in downtown New York City, the two scenes have always travelled together. This literary/musical intersection is the subject of an enjoyable new book of essays and interviews, Beat Punks by Victor Bockris, a familiar biographer and chronicler of the New York downtown scene. The East Village is the locale, St. Mark's Place is the epicenter, and Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol are the characters who show up in these highly interesting pages.