Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
If my French were better, I might give it a try. Or my Spanish, either one.
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Myself, I find that reading a favourite novel in translation does help me grasp the language better, since I'm already familiar with the story and have a fair idea of what the characters are saying and doing and What It All Means, and often already own a copy that I can refer back to and compare. (And the built-in dictionaries on the Sony and my Mac do come in handy sometimes, since it's so easy to pause and look stuff up.)
If you've a favourite kids/YA sf/fantasy series that's available, you might want to give it a try. I bought a bunch of Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci and Moving Castle books in French a long time ago for this purpose, and I picked up the recent paperback reprints of Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness Quartet and some Robert A. Heinlein juveniles and short story translations as well since I've been getting the e-books via Baen's Bundles.
If you check the BC Library, it's possible you might luck out on some titles that you could start with. IIRC, they had a reasonably decent-ish selection of non-English languages in their e-book catalogue.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
How has the wide availability of eBooks changed that publishing picture? Do they do eBook versions? Or just paperback?
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I have both francophone ebook versions and paperbacks now, though for translated sf/fantasy, paperbacks are still much more widely available for most titles from most of the French imprints, and the price is pretty much the same: already fairly high, and within ~1-3 dollars in either direction (and Amazon & Chapters often regularly discount at 5-15% off online and Archambault runs these periodic special promotions for 20% off if you buy a minimum of 3 books at a time, whereas French publishers are generally non-couponable and very, very rarely ever discount anything at all).
A lot of my favourite authors who do have French translations just flat-out aren't available in francophone ebook versions at all (at least, not in Canada), although they do seem to be more commonly represented in Spanish and German (and Polish!) translations available in the Kobo store.
Also, money-saving omnibus editions are available for paperbacks which aren't for the ebook versions, which are usually sold exclusively as singles. As an example, I own #1-5 of "L'intégrale" TPB editions from Pygmalion/J'ai Lu for George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, which exactly correspond to #1-5 of the English language originals.
In French, due to length, each book was originally split into 2-3 volumes for translation, and they are sold separately @ Amazon/Kobo etc. for between $16-20 CAD apiece for tomes #1-14 covering the series thus far, non-couponable. (And $16 CAD is roughly what the MMPB individual paperbacks would cost you anyway.)
By contrast, my omnibus of #5 of L'intégrale, covering tomes #12-14 corresponding to ADWD, had a base price of $40 CAD, which went down to $32 CAD after Archambault's Black Friday weekend mystery coupon sale, which I kept retrying until they gave me a max-level 20% off code (with free shipping over $40).
Similarly, I paid $12 for my mass market paperback copy of the collected first 2 Dunk & Egg tie-in novellas from Amazon, whereas the e-book version is going for $16 (to be fair, the TPB edition of that which is sold by the publisher who actually puts out the ebook, which is not the same as the publisher who puts out the MMPB, is in the $30 range).
Some books do wind up being cheaper in e-book version, though. Guy Gavriel Kay's translations out from Alire in MMPB are roughly $15-19 CAD per, but the e-books at Kobo are around $8-10 for the main part, and since I don't already have him in French in paper, I'll probably pick up the e-versions instead of starting on the PBs.
Also, some books which are technically out of print (or at least severely unavailable between reprintings) are now still purchaseable in ebook editions. For example, the individual MMPBs of Mercedes Lackey's Arrows and Mage War trilogies are extremely difficult to track down in paperback (though there are new omnibus TPBs of both of them), but you can now buy them @ Kobo, etc. for $8.99 a pop, although the $27 total cost of the e-books in each trilogy works out to be higher than the $24 base price of the corresponding paper omnibuses (the MMPBs were $14.95 each, IIRC).