E-book news!!!

[aliantha]

I've just signed contracts that allow Random House (owner of DEL REY/Ballantine) to publish "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever," "The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant," and "Mordant's Need" as e-books.

Normally this process would take 3 or 6 or 9 or even 12 months: Random House is a huge company, and the queue of physical books awaiting conversion is long. However, I've made the situation more complicated (and therefore more time-consuming? Maybe, maybe not). Because Random House (owner of SPECTRA/Bantam) did such a shoddy job with the original e-publication of the GAP books, I've attached an amendment to the contract requiring Random House to start with Word DOC files which I will provide. In other words, Random House has agreed NOT to use their normal scan/OCR/proofread-in-India procedure for preparing e-books. Of course, this puts the burden on me to supply clean texts. But better that than a repetition of the GAP debacle.

I have already delivered clean texts for LORD FOUL'S BANE, THE ILLEARTH WAR, and THE POWER THAT PRESERVES. If my support staff continues to function steadily (I really do not have time to do all the work myself), I should be able to deliver a subsequent volume every 6-8 weeks. So: once the first trilogy has been released (early April 2012, or so I've been led to believe), the later books should follow at roughly two-month intervals. Unless (he said shamelessly) poor sales persuade Random House to push my books back in the queue.

12/27/11

LFB will be out in APRIL!!

[Avatar]

Pffft. It's been out for my whole life.

(Glad to hear that they'll be clean copies though.)

--A

[dlbpharmd]

Good news!

[starkllr]

Does anybody know where this stands now? The first Chronicles were hopefully going to be releeased as ebooks in "early april". It's early April...

[aliantha]

Just checked Amazon.com and Amazon.uk -- no Kindle editions of the first Chrons yet.

[wayfriend]

(Today I discovered that if you search for "ebook chronicles donaldson" in google, the second result is "Amazon.com: Audrey's Anal Punishment: Erotic Chronicles eBook: Larson Donaldson". [Does google tailor it's search results to match my search history?])

[aliantha]

<backs away slowly>

[Lefdmae Deemalr Effaeldm]

(Today I discovered that if you search for "ebook chronicles donaldson" in google, the second result is "Amazon.com: Audrey's Anal Punishment: Erotic Chronicles eBook: Larson Donaldson". [Does google tailor it's search results to match my search history?])

It does, and many others do It even warns, at least in Chrome settings there's quite a lot on that.

I have many e-mail accounts and mail.ru proved to be the most obvious: when I'm in a "20-something years old female" account, it shows me ads with clothes, cute animals etc., when it's the "100-something years old male" I get Viagra-like meds ads

And your "ebook chronicles donaldson" gives me mostly correct SRD-related results, no wonder, I looked for that a lot, but also the one you mentioned and some book with violence and anti-social behavior, and a rhyming rabbit book, Stephen King-based TV series, The Fry Chronicles - Stephen Fry and a few links with no content I recognized. Wondered about the rabbit one a bit, but not much, I did the Bucky O'Hare searches after all, and it would be too much to expect of the search engine to grasp how distant from the normal hares and rabbits that is)

[StevieG]

(Today I discovered that if you search for "ebook chronicles donaldson" in google, the second result is "Amazon.com: Audrey's Anal Punishment: Erotic Chronicles eBook: Larson Donaldson". [Does google tailor it's search results to match my search history?])

Wayfriend, you are the author of some of the greatest posts on the Watch - this is one of them (to me, anyway)

[wayfriend]

And you are rediculously easy to impress.

I sent mail to Romeo about the e-books. Maybe some news will come back.

[Absolam]

I hope you get some feedback on the schedule. I've tried checking the publisher for a release date but no luck. I lost all my books to a fire a few years back and invested in an ebook reader. So this is something I have been very excited about. I've been chomping at the bit for April to get here!

-Absolam

[Absolam]

Just saw the update on the news link that TC1 will be released as ebooks on 5/16. Oh well, I suppose I can wait for another month.
-Absolam

[aliantha]

Excellent news! Looks like all three volumes of the first Chrons will be released the same day.

[wayfriend]

This is substantially later than I was led to expect. Apparently the delay was caused (somehow) by the map.

It's always the map!

[dlbpharmd]

Great news!

[Absolam]

In case anyone is interested I thought I would post a short review on my perceived quality of the newly released TC1 ebooks. Let me be upfront in admitting I have not completed all 3 novels of TC1 yet. I am about 2/3 of the way through TIW.
Overall I am happy with the quality. There are no glaring issues such as omissions or incorrect sequencing. There are several typos of various sorts. At a guess ( I did not count them ) I would say something like 1 every ten pages. The vast majority of these typos are very minor and your brain will correct them almost before you notice them, mor instead of more or he instead of she, as examples. A few however are more serious perhaps an entirely incorrect word with a (stretch of the imagination here) somewhat similar spelling. These have made me actually have to stop and think a bit about them before I figured out what was intended. This is rare though, maybe 3-4 times in nearly 2 books. Overall I did not find the typos a huge distraction but it is defnitely noticable. Also, having read these books dozens of times over the past 30ish years, it may be a less significant problem for me than new readers would find it. Just saying...
Summary: If you are like me and have invested in an ereader and you are a fan of TC I think they are worth the money. I intend to buy TC2 as they become available.

For what it is worth.
-Absolam

[Avatar]

[Does google tailor it's search results to match my search history?]

Depends if you're logged into a Google account when you search or not. Also can be affected by cookies on your machine.

--A

[I'm Murrin]

There's a button on Google now (at least on modern browsers - google reverts to old style if you can't support the current version) that lets you choose whether or not to use personal results (two icons, one a silhouette of head and shoulders, other a globe, top of search results). I'm not sure how exactly it affects them, though.

[wayfriend]

Thanks, Absolam!

They sound about as good as any other e-book, and better than most.

Personally, I hate when they insert a paragraph break where there should not be one. And I really, really hate when they remove the extra space that signals a scene change.

BTW, looks like they are going for about $8 U.S. each.

[aliantha]

Yes, thanks, Absalom! For all my initial enthusiasm, I confess I forgot about this. I was checking early on to see if I could preorder, but when there wasn't an option for that, it slipped my mind. Bad ali!

BTW, looks like they are going for about $8 U.S. each.

Thank goodness for the Justice Department. Otherwise I expect we'd be paying $12 or $14 apiece.