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The future is here ... sort of. This week's avalanche of downloads of Stephen King's new ghost story have proven the model of digital delivery of traditional media. The numbers were stunning.

More than 400,000 orders for the novella "Riding the Bullet" were received by Web sites that had deals with King's publisher, Simon & Schuster, to give away or sell the book via the Net. Heavy demand meant that the sites couldn't keep up and all the orders weren't filled. Barnesandnoble.com reported that on Tuesday, the only day it gave the story away for free, it had requests every 2.5 seconds. Amazon.com, which is offering the story free for two weeks, reported requests every 1.5 seconds. But the real stunner was over at NetLibrary.com, where they weren't giving the title away at all. They were selling it for $2.50, and moving 400 units per hour.

There are two key factors to this success story. One, obviously, is Stephen King, the best-selling author in history, who is returning from a much-publicized hiatus after a gruesome hit-and-run accident. There was bound to be huge interest from fans.

But the second factor is platform agnosticism, and therein lies the lesson for future online book publishing efforts. You can get the King story in several formats -- on personal "e-books" that don't have a very large installed base yet, in Adobe Acrobat format, in the Glassbook software format, and onto Palm Pilots.

In each case, the publisher is able to control the information downloaded and to some degree, discourage copying and copyright infringement. The model has tremendous power, especially if more formats are added over time. And it should be a lesson to the music and film industries, which are struggling to come to terms with the digital age.

They have to ask themselves this question this morning -- if the old world of book publishing, with its Byzantine system of publishers and paper, can spawn a major Internet hit, why can't they?

Finally, remember the cost of paper, binding, production, shipping, and the like? Well, Simon & Schuster just dropped that stuff from its budget in this case. It shifted some of the cost of production to the consumer. And it erased most of the cost of distribution. So, in this case (and it is special), digital distribution of print was a bigger winner and consumers showed a willingness to pay.