STEPHEN KING did it, Frederick Forsyth is doing it, and Douglas Adams is going to do it before the end of the year.

They are all leading the e-book revolution.

Printed books will be outnumbered by electronic books in the future, which the Internet, as it is with MP3 music files, set to become the medium for distributing the latest stories.

When thriller writer Stephen King offered the first chapter of his new book, The Plant, for downloading earlier this year, demand was so great that the website crashed under the strain.

Even more remarkable was the response to his request for payment, with more than 80 per cent of the estimated 200,000 downloaders willing to pay a dollar (65p) to read the chapter on screen.

The author has promised to keeping on writing new chapters as long as a fair proportion of punters are prepared to pay for the privilege.

With 'pocket PCs' capable of displaying text files now coming on to the market, publishers are already bracing themselves for a growing demand for e-books, with some analysts forecasting the biggest revolution in literature since the invention of the printing press, half a millennium ago.