Putin memoir to appear on Internet

[Michael Pugliese]

Russian President-elect Vladimir Putin will be emulating best-selling horror
story writer Stephen King as a cyberspace author later this month. Mr Putin
is making his translated memoirs ''First Person'' available on the Internet
at the same time it lands in US bookstores on the weekend of April 29 and
30, US publisher PublicAffairs said yesterday. The publisher struck a deal
with netLibrary, a Boulder, Colorado, electronic distributor that obtained
exclusive rights to issue Mr Putin's book over the Internet on its Peanut
Press website http://www.peanutpress.com. Readers will be able to read the
book online by personal computer or on a Palm Pilot. ''First Person'' is
based on interviews the former KGB security police spy Mr Putin did with
three Russian journalists over a period of a week to 10 days. The memoir has
been published in Russian but will not appear on the Internet in Cyrillic.
(Media Central / Reuters, April 18, 2000)