Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
I'll only do that after I've read at least the first, and preferably a couple of the books in the series.
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Hm, OK. Sometimes I "need" (want) a series because it's referenced from another series, something which happens often in the shared universes such as Dungeons and Dragons.
As all that stuff is in the same vein (you either like it, or not), I often take a chance and just buy the entire referenced series at once. It's often not even possible to read only one book in the middle, or only the first, because you either won't understand, or you'll be left with an incomplete story.
Even worse, reading the first book in the series and deciding based on the quality of this is often impossible also, because it happens quite a lot that one series is written by 2-6 authors.
It's like this: "We're going to create $event in $world, and to make that canon, we are going to put out $series1, $series2 and $series3, a total of 10 books. They'll all be published in 2013 and 2014, and will be written by 6 different authors."
This is one of the reasons why I started e-reading. This stuff can become A LOT of books. Such a paperback will cost me €8.99 in The Netherlands. The e-book costs €4.49-€6.49 depending on the seller, and with a coupon such as this, it drops to €2.50. Huge savings, in both money and space.
And to be honest, I *don't* want to spend €8.99 for books like that anymore. In the 80's, there weren't so many authors writing in these shared worlds. Now, companies such as Wizards of the Coast think stuff up, and the authors write the novels to make it canon. Back then, it was the other way around: authors wrote stuff, and then the rulebooks and such would be expanded.
These books are fun to read, but being just "production fantasy" (compare with the 100 bazillion romance novels), roughly 250 pages a piece, €8.99 is expensive. I think €4.50 is a MUCH better price for these books. Apart from some epic exceptions (The first 6 Drizzt novels, for example), they're just not worth more.
Yeah, I hit a snag sometimes. For example, "Elminster 4 - Elminster in Hell" is very, very bad. (I have it in paper.) If I buy the series as e-book to replace the paper versions, I'll still buy it to keep the series complete.