[Katsunami]

If you think that 4500 pages for an omnibus is big, then get some stuff at Delphi Classics. At 2400 characters per page (average paperback in my book case), some of those omnibuses are close to 20.000 pages.

They're so big, that Calibre is not able to convert them from EPUB to AZW3. Therefore I use KindleGen and the commandline version of KindleUnpack to first convert the EPUB to MOBI/KF8 combo-format, and then extract the AZW3 from that.

In the beginning, I was thinking about splitting up these omnibuses, but I've decided against doing that. While their books are very good, there are bound to be some errors with books of this size. (Often encountered: an HTML ToC in which a link is actually not a link.) Therefore, they update their books, and I'm unwilling to resplit the books after an update. Way too much work.

The two things I don't like about omnibuses is (this is general, and by no means a Delphi gripe):

First: You can't mark a part of it as "Read". I'm probably never going to read everything; for example, I have the "Homer" omnibus, but I'm going to read just ONE translation of The Iliad, and ONE of The Odyssee (probably the prose ones). There are 6 of each in there, some incomplete works, some works attributed to Homer (but it's not certain he actually wrote them), and the original greek versions.

I've resolved this by just creating an empty book in Calibre, filling the metadata, sticking a nice cover onto it, and then mark it "Read"; the description will have a line at the top saying "Book contained in Homer Compilation by Delphi Classics". (I actually fill out the page number, by looking up the start and end page of the book on the Kindle.)

Obviously, I do the same thing for other books.

Second: Many omnibuses are huge. If there is something I don't like, it's almost impossible to open them in Sigil. Often the "Tweak Book" function in Calibre is enough, but for some stuff, Sigil is easier. (I know Kovid is working on a Sigil-like Tweak Book function. YAY!)

I think that the size of the books is a matter of pride for Delphi. As they are all public domain works, and they all have no DRM and are all downloaded through the Delphi website, there is NO reason to sell an omnibus that's 20.000 pages in size. They could just as well sell a zip-file.

Maybe they still do it this way because they are also in the Amazon and Kobo stores, where zip-files are a no-go; but then again, I think they should provide the option for people who buy through their website.

If I buy an onmibus of a series, with 2-6 books in it or so, one that will probably never be updated, then I'll probably split it up. Splitting it up is not going to take much more time than creating the empty book.

I'm not going to bother doing that with something like the Delphi Classics. I'm not going to split up 31 novels, 73 short stories, 18 plays, 4 opera's and 8 biographies, if I don't know yet what I'm going to read, exactly.

For example, I've bought the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle omnibus (~12K pages) because I want to read the Sherlock and Challenger stuff, and I'm interested in one of the non-fiction book "Through the magic door", but I don't know (yet) if I'm going to read all his other stuff. The opera is definitely out. The reason why I didn't look for the Sherlock and Challenger stuff (and that one book) seperately is because Delphi gave me the option to have everything at once, and illustrated and all, for almost nothing, because of their last 25 and 50% sales.

The same holds true for all other Delphi books I've bought (I've got 23 of them now).