Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce
EDIT: They are also available on Fictionwise with a 100% credit.
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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 idoes have those illustrations. (And 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
Quote:
Originally Posted by Seabound
The post title says it all. Just got the email from Fictionwise a few minutes ago.
Edited to add: I just checked the Fictionwise site and indeed they are there. The price is right!
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