Your Favourite SF & Fantasy Series

[foreverjuly]

Originally Posted by Kurt

ahh

so many books/authors i would love to re-read

where are the ebooks?

every one i've looked for are not available - - - well, not legitimately anyway


actually was amazed at the pirating of books - who knew
maybe authors should get a clue?

I feel your pain, Kurt. It's a shame so many publishers are dithering over ebooks. Yes, some are fighting over rights but some don't seem to have any inclination. I'm sure they could crank out the Harry Potter books tomorrow if they wanted to. Until then we'll just have to venture out and keep finding new stuff!

[slayda]

I always find this sort of listing interesting because I tend to not fit most other people's interest. A few matched my taste, e.g. Chanur series by Cherryh, Time trader series by Norton, & Honor series by Weber, and several authors I like but more often than not the series mention are ones that I did not like.

Not yet mentioned (or at least I didn't notice them) are;

• the Crystal Singer series by Anne McCaffrey,
• the Psion series (Psion, Catspaw, & Dreamfall) by Joan D. Vinge,
• the Third World series by Ed Howdershelt,
• the Grendel series (The Legacy of Heorot & Beowulf's Children) by Niven, Pournelle, & Barnes,
• (some would say not SF but it has the flavor of SF to me) the prehistory series (beginning with Clan of the Cave Bear) by Jean Auel.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by slayda

the Psion series (Psion, Catspaw, & Dreamfall) by Joan D. Vinge

I think those did get mentioned earlier, but in any case I agree. (Though I found the end of Dreamfall depressing.)

Another vote for Ian Banks' Culture books, especially The Player of Games. Fans of Banks might also like John Barnes (e.g. Orbital Resonance, A Million Open Doors).

[Lyndl]

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Stephen Donaldson
Song of Ice and Fire - George R R Martin
The Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan
Dune - mainly the 1st, sequels were OK
Otherworld - Tad Williams
Memory, Sorrow & Thorn - Tad Williams
Shannara - Terry Brooks, I always recommend this series to new fantasy readers. It's a great primer.
The Exiles - Melanie Rawn
Night's Dawn Trilogy - Peter F Hamilton

and many more that I can;t think of right now

[dharh]

Originally Posted by foreverjuly

I feel your pain, Kurt. It's a shame so many publishers are dithering over ebooks. Yes, some are fighting over rights but some don't seem to have any inclination. I'm sure they could crank out the Harry Potter books tomorrow if they wanted to. Until then we'll just have to venture out and keep finding new stuff!

Part of the problem is the authors of older books are not trusting the editors/publishers with their works. Take Stephen R. Donaldson for example. Lots of us would love to see the more Chronicles of Thomas Covenant but at the moment the author will not negotiate the rights to the ebooks. Why? Because of the botched job of the GAP series (lots of editing errors). As the author said on his website, its easier to make an ebook from a word document as is the case for modern books -> ebooks, but for older stuff like GAP and Covenant series, going from manuscript to ebook requires good editing.

The good news that the publishers are finally doing better. I've personally noticed less errors. And Stephen R. Donaldson said that the publishers of the GAP series are redoing/fixing the ebooks. If they do a good job, he will negotiate the Covenant series.

There are like a hundred books id love to see done in ebook, but its the publishers that need to get their stuff together, not really the authors.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by foreverjuly

I feel your pain, Kurt. It's a shame so many publishers are dithering over ebooks. Yes, some are fighting over rights but some don't seem to have any inclination. I'm sure they could crank out the Harry Potter books tomorrow if they wanted to. Until then we'll just have to venture out and keep finding new stuff!

The problem with the Harry Potter books isn't the publisher, it's the author. J. K. Rowling has flatly refused to license ebook editions. I've no idea why, and think it's silly, but she owns the rights.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by dharh

There are like a hundred books id love to see done in ebook, but its the publishers that need to get their stuff together, not really the authors.

It's both.

In the case of Harry Potter, the hold up is J. K. Rowling, who won't authorize an electronic edition.

Tor is finally releasing ebooks of the Wheel of Time series, but that had to wait for someone (Pablo Defendini when he was at Tor.com, I believe), to convince his widow Harriet to allow it. Robert Jordan was opposed to ebook releases.

And some books are more of a challenge than others. As mentioned, it's (relatively) easy to create an ebook from a Word file, though things could be better there. Right now, everyone submits Word documents as manuscripts. After editing, copy editing, and proofreading, the final version goes to DTP and is imported to InDesign for typesetting and markup. The output from InDesign is a PDF, which goes to a printer as input to the imagesetter that creates the plates the book will be printed form.

InDesign can also output to ePub, but does so poorly. Good ePub requires well formed XML as input, and the tools are only beginning to appear in publisher's work flows.

My personal hope is further improvement to InDesign, so creating an ebook is simple as Save As ePub operation once the typesetting and markup is complete. ePub has all the content and metadata, and can be the source for other ebook formats if desired through automated conversion.

The biggest issue is books written before Word and InDesign were what everyone used. In some cases, there may no be an electronic manuscript to start from, and producing an ebook will requires scanning a hard copy and correcting the attendant errors.

(Think of the Kindle editions produced that way, where scanning was done, but editing/proofreading wasn't, to the loud displeasure of the buyers.)
______
Dennis

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The problem with the Harry Potter books isn't the publisher, it's the author. J. K. Rowling has flatly refused to license ebook editions. I've no idea why, and think it's silly, but she owns the rights.]

And the pity is that they *are* available on the darknet. Beautifully formatted, zero OCR errors and easily discoverable. All she's doing is losing money. She hasn't stopped their publication.

[kcmay]

For SF, I really loved David Brin's Uplift series.
For fantasy, I'm going to have to go with Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

And the pity is that they are available on the darknet. Beautifully formatted, zero OCR errors and easily discoverable.

Certainly. I've seen them. Obvious labors of love by folks who wanted ebook editions and were willing to take the time to do proper editing and formatting.

All she's doing is losing money. She hasn't stopped their publication.

No, and she can't stop that sort of release.

But tell her. My guess is that she's writing for kids, and doesn't see them as possessing or using ebook readers or other devices to read electronic formats. I thinks she's blithely ignoring all the adults who read her books, and placed advance orders at Amazon and the like to get them as soon as possible. Drop the adult readers and I've no doubt she'd still be an international best seller, but I suspect most authors would kill for just the adult segment of her readership.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by kcmay

For SF, I really loved David Brin's Uplift series.

I'll concur, and wish he'd do more of them. There are some major unresolved plot threads.

I'm also fond of Peter Hamilton's "Night's Dawn" trilogy, complete with a Deus ex Machina ending that actually works.
______
Dennis

[slayda]

Originally Posted by nekokami

I think those did get mentioned earlier, but in any case I agree. (Though I found the end of Dreamfall depressing.)

[/I]).

I have to agree that Psion & Catspaw were much better than Dreamfall. Mainly I liked the concepts, especially psychically entering a computer network.

[dharh]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

My personal hope is further improvement to InDesign, so creating an ebook is simple as Save As ePub operation once the typesetting and markup is complete. ePub has all the content and metadata, and can be the sdource for other ebook formats if desired through automated conversion.

Wow. I'm super surprised this isn't the case already. As a programmer/designer myself with something so obvious as this kind of feature it would have been done a year ago at the latest.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by dharh

Wow. I'm super surprised this isn't the case already. As a programmer/designer myself with something so obvious as this kind of feature it would have been done a year ago at the latest.

It's especially mystifying because Adobe is the major force behind the ePub standard, which evolved from the Open eBook specs. You would think, if they were pushing hard to get a format adopted as a standard, that they'd be working to make tools to create documents using that standard.

It's probably a side-effect of their focus on PDF as an electronic document format, and the fact that everybody who uses InDesign expects PDFs as the output, because that's what the printer wants to see. So InDesign will do PDF output perfectly, because that's what the customers are buying, but ePub will be back burner because most of their customers don't (yet) care about it. This is an obstacle to change. I had dinner Thursday night with an old friend who is a designer, and does both print and online stuff. He talked about a publisher he works with with print and online divisions. The online folks are well aware of the technology involved and the possibilities it provides. The folks on the print side are another matter entirely.

At the Barnes and Noble eBook launch, an Adobe rep told me point releases of InDesign had fixes intended for better ePub support, but I don't know what the current state of development is. (I have an ancient 2.0 release of InDesign, but can't justify upgrading to a current release.)

Meanwhile, two big roadblocks to ebooks are lack of a standard format everyone supports, and lack of tools to create the electronic texts.

The first is slowly occurring, and it looks like ePub will be the winner. You may not like it, but it's the most widely used (by everyone save Amazon...) And as mentioned, it's a base from which you can convert to other formats if desired. Standards efforts are always time-consuming, fraught, and political, with lots of folks with axes to grind saying "We firmly support standards. Do it our way!", so the slow nature of the process is not a surprise.

The second is the bigger problem. As mentioned, everyone submits Word documents as manuscripts, and all major publishers use InDesign to create the finished books. What we want is for the creation of ebooks to be essentially automatic, as part of the standard workflow for the publisher, without requiring extra steps, tools, and expertise. That requirement means we are really asking for improvements to InDesign, as few producers will want to switch to a different product or add yet another tool to their existing process. If InDesign matures to the point where the print/ebook workflow is "Save As PDF/Save As ePub", we'll be a very long way down that road.

There will still be gotchas. There are some things (like textbooks) where the content pretty much requires PDF, as you need to see the page as it would look if it was printed, and Save As ePub will produce less than optimal results no matter how good InDesign is at producing it. But those will be a minority of the total books published.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for the Promised Land, but progress is occurring.
______
Dennis

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by kcmay

For SF, I really loved David Brin's Uplift series.
For fantasy, I'm going to have to go with Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy.

That's actually coming out later this year. Startide Rising is already out.