Of course some would say she hadn’t actually published online. Rather she had used the medium to promote a paper book. Still, the prospect of purely electronic publishing beckoned. “I was seduced by the prospect of the then 10 million people on the Internet—10 million literate people with disposable incomes—attached to the Net. Why not acquire lots of Internet rights to lots of books and put them online at the Online BookStore. Surely some percentage of those people would buy files of a popular author’s books for a reasonable price.”[4.29] Fillmore was sensible enough to price her offerings for consumers who were spending their own money, not their bosses’. Some commercial databases were charging as much as $200 per hour or more, while Fillmore was thinking more in terms of $5, say, for a short story downloaded from the Net. The test story was “Umney’s Last Case,” a fifty-page Stephen King story from a collection called _Nightmares and Dreamscapes_. King was among the best-selling writers on the planet. Fillmore dreamed of tens of thousands of dialups even if “Umney” intrigued only 1 percent of the 10 million people on the Net at the time. Fillmore had picked out just the right King story, one where a time traveler gave a Toshiba T-1000 laptop computer to a tough detective around 1939—someone who in turn used his “plastic Buck Rogers steno machine” to write a story within King’s own tale. Fillmore’s “Umney” project was a sensation at the biggest book fair in the world, the one at Frankfurt; upbeat stories appeared in places ranging from European news programs to the _Wall Street Journal_. She witnessed “a vast amount of smoke, a tremendous marketing boost for the printed book again, lots of noise—and by extension, lots of profit for the publisher and for the author—but handfuls of per-copy sales.”[4.30] They didn’t even pay for all the phone calls used to set up the deal. I was hardly surprised. Enjoying access to many megs of free material on the Net, the typical denizen didn’t want to shell out even $5 for the story even if she or he could simply fax in a credit card number. It wasn’t that King’s work was worthless—quite the opposite. Rather, on the Internet and with this business model, “Umney” at most any realistic price could not compete with free material such as Usenet postings.