King's empire, you could argue, is everything that's wrong with publishing as well as the reading public. Well, you have to agree with some of this, and as an English teacher, I know that at least part of my job is to loiter in the school library and make sure the kids are reading Ivanhoe or Two Years before the Mast instead of 'Salem's Lot or The Stand . I'm supposed to tell students that their time would be better spent reading Franklin's Autobiography than Christine . But if we assume that getting people to read is a worthy end, it's hard to see the King of Horror's empire as anything other than a good thing. In fact, I'll stake my reputation as a fuddy-duddy and say that reading his first 8 or 9 books were instrumental in making me a dedicated reader.
Nothing comes close.
It's part of our old mistrustful love affairs with both money and learning. We lament the nation's preference for smart bombs to smart children, then object when a writer gets rich by actually getting kids to read. With King, there is the added benefit that he is, by any reasonable standard, a good writer. Maybe Andrew is the kind of geek who would have become a book junky even without Stephen King's assistance. But this year, thousands of kids will read Bag of Bones and tell themselves that it is The Best Book Ever.