Ed McBain's missing e-books are killing me

[djulian]

What a weird market e-books can be.

Ed McBain's 87th Precinct is a personal favorite, of which all of the 54 novels are available in e-book format except for three. One of these (And All Through the House), I understand, as it's a novella and less well-known. The other two (Doll and Mischief) are just normal novels in the series.

What gives? This is not literally killing me, but it's kind of driving me bonkers.

Any other series with the majority of the works available and just a few missing? If I remember correctly, the first book in George Pelecanos' DC Quartet series is also not available as an e-book.

Strange. Just exceedingly strange.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by djulian

Strange. Just exceedingly strange.

The same is true with some multi-author series in the Forgotten Realms universe. Sometimes one of the books (such as book 3 in the 16-book Harpers series, or book 1 in the 7-book Sembia series) is just not available as an e-book.

It also happens with mutli-author books: Author A and B have all of their e-books available, but books written by A and B together are not available.

[rkomar]

Copyrights can get very complicated. They can get spread around various owners over a series, and some of those owners may not be interested in publishing, and/or may have unrealistic demands for publishing in electronic format. For example, the popular Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski was very slow in coming to the English world because of copyright issues. It appeared that the original English rights owner was squatting on the copyrights and had no intention of publishing anything; rather they just wanted to sell the rights at a higher price to someone else. It took a while for Gollancz to acquire the rights and start the publishing process.

So, the problem may not be that a publisher is just being weird about a few titles; it may be that those titles belong to someone else.

[barryem]

I think that's just the way it is in ebooks. It'll take time to fill in all the missing books. Some will never get filled in.

I keep an eye out for certain books I read back in my youth that haven't been available as ebooks and every now and then one will show up. Sometimes whole authors are missing even though they were huge best sellers when I was young.

One of the best selling authors in paperback in the 1950s and 1960s was Frank Yerby. Most of his were precursors to today's romance novels, which hadn't become a thing yet. But he also wrote some really good and well researched historical novels and, except for a couple based on the New Testament, they're simply unavailable.

John O'Hara, one of the most respected and best selling writers in that same period, was also unavailable till a couple of years ago. Then someone decided to publish his books, finally.

It just takes time. It's the nature of the business that they can't do it all at once. In some ways that's kind of fun, although it really can be frustrating at times.

I just bought a paper Frank Yerby book and a paper Frank G. Slaughter book, both favorites of my youth. I haven't read a paper book in well over a decade. Maybe two. I'm not sure I'll talk myself into reading these but I'll try.

One thing I'd forgotten about paper books was that there's no front light. How aggravating.

Barry

[GeoffR]

I hate the missing ebooks in a series too, but even more frustrating is when the book is missing because it never got translated into English. Roslund & Hellström's series of crime novels has 7 parts so far in Swedish, five have been translated into English with a sixth one due this year, but they skipped the fourth book. I can stand reading the odd paper book to complete a series, but learning Swedish is beyond my capability.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

I hate the missing ebooks in a series too, but even more frustrating is when the book is missing because it never got translated into English. Roslund & Hellström's series of Swedish crime novels has 7 parts so far in Swedish, five have been translated into English with a sixth one due this year, but they skipped the fourth book. I can stand reading the odd paper book to complete a series, but learning Swedish is beyond my capability.

Obviously, you are not a true fan, I mean Doctor Strange learned Sanskrit in order to read magic books in their original form..

[Katsunami]

With regard to The Witcher; I've seen the first two books in Dutch, in a bookshop around here, so it's not only the English version that's finally getting out.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by djulian

What gives? This is not literally killing me, but it's kind of driving me bonkers.

That's a bit of relief, though I must admit, I keep thinking it would make a great plot for a mystery story.

An Ebook reader (maybe with a bad ticker, and a shady past) with a passion for mysteries is hounded by his need to complete his collection. The stress on the poor reader is enormous. Then when the stress is at it's peak, a hot dame whose name is, curiously, P. Domain, comes to his door with an offer to sell the missing epub file, only his ebook reading device accepts only mobi.

What does she want? Where did the ePub come from? And who is this "Guttenberg" that calls him at the bewitching hour of 4:00 pm while he is eating the "Jack Benny" special at the local "All you Can Eat" Buffet Restaurant?

Sounds like a best seller to me.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by djulian

Ed McBain's 87th Precinct is a personal favorite, of which all of the 54 novels are available in e-book format except for three. One of these (And All Through the House), I understand, as it's a novella and less well-known. The other two (Doll and Mischief) are just normal novels in the series.

Like you, these two omissions frustrate me. I do have a decent scan of And All Through the House, though without the pictures from the original edition.

Another one is book 8 of 16 in Westlake's Dortmunder series (Don't Ask). All the rest are available, and books 6-13 were all published originally by Mysterious Press, and they seem to have a good relationship with OpenRoad for ebooks. OpenRoad was responsible for the first 7 ebooks of the series, and 9 and beyond seem to be from GrandCentral, so I can't see how book 8 isn't covered by at least one of these companies.

Also, books 7-9 (out of 22) of Jack Higgins' Sean Dillon series aren't available. This makes some sense, though, as he moved around publishers quite a bit in the early days, and those 3 could have been lost to some company that no longer exists.

The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You! is the only one of the 12 books in the series not available.

Not as few missing, but 10 of the 24 Dirk Pitt books aren't available as ebooks. This omission is also very strange, since you'd think whoever holds the rights would be hurrying to get those sales.

Originally Posted by barryem

I just bought a paper Frank Yerby book and a paper Frank G. Slaughter book, both favorites of my youth.

I have dozen of Slaughter's medical and "thriller" books in paper, but the only ebooks of his are a couple of the Biblical ones.

[AlexBell]

Henry Handel Richardson died in 1946, so all her works are out of copyright in death+70 countries. All her other works have been published as ebooks - The Fortunes of Richard Mahony as a Penguin Classic - but not her final work: The Young Cosima. In fact that's not available online except as a pdf from the Digital Library of India, and that pdf has a password on it preventing any copying or translation to another format.

I'd love to do an ebook for the MR library, and have a print copy on order. But I don't know if I'll be able to get the text into an electronic format.

[Tarana]

I have all the Ed McBain in eBook except that novella because i didn't know about it. I got Dolls and Mischief at Uncle Edgar's and sent them off to 1dollarscan to scan them. Converted the pdf files using Abbyy Transformer, a few edits in and they were good to go. Unlike many of you, I don't have the choice to read paper due to vision damage.

I will say that not all the old books translate perfectly due type choices of the publisher. I've had my mom helping me with an old Alfred Hitchcock book where the original type was set too close together with a curlicue font. I'll know these stories by heart by time I am done next month.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Tarana

I will say that not all the old books translate perfectly due type choices of the publisher. I've had my mom helping me with an old Alfred Hitchcock book where the original type was set too close together with a curlicue font. I'll know these stories by heart by time I am done next month.

Which Hitchcock book did you have scanned? I have a number of old Alfred Hitchcock Presents hard cover anthologies that I'd love to have scanned.

Does 1dollarscan offer any format options besides PDF?

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by Tarana

I have all the Ed McBain in eBook except that novella because i didn't know about it. I got Dolls and Mischief at Uncle Edgar's and sent them off to 1dollarscan to scan them. Converted the pdf files using Abbyy Transformer, a few edits in and they were good to go. Unlike many of you, I don't have the choice to read paper due to vision damage.

I will say that not all the old books translate perfectly due type choices of the publisher. I've had my mom helping me with an old Alfred Hitchcock book where the original type was set too close together with a curlicue font. I'll know these stories by heart by time I am done next month.

That's the problem I have with with this process. The more carefully I proof, the less I'll ever want to read that book again.

[barryem]

I scanned and proofed a few ebooks decades ago in the days before you could buy ebooks. It's a real hassle and sure did ruin the books for me.

Later I did volunteer proofing for Gutenberg for a number of years and there you proof a single page. Then, when you've done it you can do more pages in the same book or another book. There's nothing about the process that can spoil a book for reading.

Anyway for those who want to proof without spoiling things for yourself that's a good way to do it. Gutenberg makes it very easy and painless. You just go there in your browser and it shows you a page and lets you edit it. Your edit will then be passed to someone else to do again, or yours might have already been done by someone else and you're just making a second pass, or a third pass, which is very fast and easy.

It's a good thing to do and worth doing.

Barry