Stephen King wowed a sold-out crowd last night at Van Wezel Hall in Sarasota, but before he chatted on stage about his smashingly scary new book Under the Dome, he talked to me by phone Saturday evening from his Casey Key home.

During the interview, we talked about the political and environmental inspirations for Under the Dome as well as King's feelings about the current book price wars. You can read the interview and my review of Dome on Saturday at tampabay.com or Sunday in the St. Petersburg Times. In the meantime, here's an outtake from our chat.

King was an e-book pioneer, publishing his novella Riding the Bullet online as a downloadable book in 2000. "I was on the cover of Time," he says. "I would go to the airport, and for the first and only time in my life, business guys would come up and talk to me. But they didn't talk about the story. They wanted to know about the business plan" for selling e-books.

King says he thought the earliest e-readers were "clumsy" and doubted whether the technology would catch on. "But then when Amazon came out with the Kindle, I thought, here we go," he says. "It's a wonderful gadget. I'm 62, and my eyes aren't as good as they used to be. I can make the print larger, and I love that.

"On the other hand, if you drop a book in the toilet, it dries out. Drop a Kindle in the toilet and you're done."

King says he has found that the books he downloads tend to be "disposable -- the kind of book you used to read on the airplane and leave for somebody else." If he does download a book and really enjoy it, he buys a paper copy. "I want to have them on the shelf."

As part of his current promotional tour for Under the Dome, he appeared last week on HLN's Morning Express. "It was Robin Meade, and you know, she's so pretty you don't expect her to be smart, too. But she asked me, 'Is the book going to be the vinyl record of the 21st century?' Maybe."

Getty Images photo of King, HLN publicity photo of Meade