TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Since we launched in 2000, Lord of the Rings is the most requested series ever at Fictionwise (followed closely by Harry Potter). We were so excited we launched our first Sunday newsletters ever.

Congrats to Harper Collins for making this finally happen.

The LOTR ebooks just went on sale two hours ago but the early numbers are impressive. A lot of fans have been waiting for this.

Very excellent news!

(Copy of review I posted to Mobileread)

I’ve just bought “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” from Fictionwise in Mobipocket format. On a quick look, I’m a little disappointed.

The covers are in black & white.

The illustrations in “The Hobbit” are black & white. Worse – they haven’t converted the colour plates to greyscale, they’ve just left them out! On the plus side, I suppose the illustrations are an OK size – about 600 pixels in largest dimension, and are sharper than I could get from a scan of a hardcover.

The text appears to be from a 2001 revision of the 1995 hardcover text, and from computer files, which is all good.

“The Lord of the Rings” has slightly bigger illustrations – up to 900 pixels in the larger dimension, but also in black & white. It seems to be complete with the appendices, but without the maps of Middle Earth and Gondor – only a map of the Shire (in black & white – no colour highlighting). Nor does it have the leaves from the Book of Mazarbul.

Which is odd, since the text seems to be from the 50th Anniversary Edition, which does have those illustrations. (On the plus side the text contains lots of corrections to mistakes in earlier versions.)

Hobbit Text: The in-line runes are there, but the graphics used are, perhaps, a little small, and, of course, can’t scale with the text. Perhaps in the ePUB they used a special embedded font, but I doubt it.
The songs seem to have been done well. It could do with a little space between text and start of song, and a little less between verses, but not too bad.
The general appearance is good – no indents at the start of chapters, indents at the start of paragraphs instead of space between paragraphs, curly quotes.

LOTR Text: Much like the hobbit in most things. Immediately obvious is a rather strange larger indent after a break in the text, which must be an encoding error, since in the printed book those indents are the same size as normal. Ah – just checked. It might be mobipocket specific, as on normal paragraphs the indent is “27″ – bad, because that’s in pixels and doesn’t scale with the font, and after a break in the text, the indent is “2em” – good, because it scales with the font, but bad because it’s a bit too big for my taste, I prefer a 1em indent.
There are some odd links in the text. For example, a link is placed on the first instance of “Gil-galed” (in chapter 11), but the link takes us to the mysterious text “185″ and nothing else. There’s no footnote in the printed book, so I suspect this is an accidental artifact.

Since this is the Mobipocket version from fictionwise, I suspect that the Kindle version is similar Perhaps the ePub is better.

So – I’m pleased to have legitimate version, but a bit disappointed that the proof-reading for the encoding seems to be a little lacking on such a big release, and that they haven’t included all the illustrations.

Paul

I went over to the Fictionwise site and I’m confused. The books appear to be free after a rebate. I guess if that’s the case, it’s not surprising that the “early numbers are impressive.”

100% micropay rebate is similar to “buy one now, get one free later”. It isn’t quite that good, because many FictionWise discounts don’t apply to your later micropay purchase, but it is effectively a 40-50% discount on the combined purchases.

I don’t see the spacing problems mentioned in the Mobipocket format. I have seen reports that the images are bigger (in pixels and bytes) in the ePub version.

I looked at some paperback versions in a shop today. It seems that The Hobbit’s list of illustrations is from the current paperback – which also drops the colour plates. (It does have one of them on the inside cover.)

As a Tolkien fan, I’m delighted by this opportunity and, as someone who doesn’t yet own an ebook reader, I appreciate all the helpful remarks that have been posted.

I have two questions.

1. Can I buy the trilogy now to read on my MacBook and later, when I get an iPhone or iPod touch, use that same file on it without DRM hassles?

2. Which format is best for use on both platforms?

Thanks!

Unfortunately, the eReader version of Lord of the Rings seems to have lots of typos. An embarrassment, actually. I’ve corresponded with fictionwise and they acknowledged the problem, but even the “fixed and replaced” version still has a lot of problems with indentation, spelling, etc. There seems to be a real problem with the non-standard letters in Tolkien’s proper names like Théoden and Barad-dûr, but that doesn’t explain all of it.

Sad.