Content Lord of the Rings Now Available! KINDLE, EPUB, PDF, LIT, and MOBI

[Godzil]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

From: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/83096-page.html

"HarperCollins will follow the digital publication of these titles with The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (£18.99), The Silmarillion (£7.99) and Unfinished Tales (£7.99) on 5th May. These e-book releases are timed to coincide with the hardback of the previously unpublished The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún."

A really good news to hear

So the 5th May we will have all the books about the Middle Earth?

[pdurrant]

Most of the ones by JRR Tolkien, at any rate.

"The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" seems to be missing, and also "The Road Goes Ever On", although being music that would be tricky in an ebook.

But the ones edited by Christopher Tolkien are still to come in ebook format I think. After "Unfinished Tales" there were lots (from wikipedia):

1983 The Book of Lost Tales 1
1984 The Book of Lost Tales 2
The earliest versions of the mythology, from start to finish
1985 The Lays of Beleriand
Two long poems (the Lay of Leithian about Beren and Lúthien, and the Túrin saga)
1986 The Shaping of Middle-earth
Start of rewriting the mythology from the beginning
1987 The Lost Road and Other Writings
Introduction of Númenor to the mythology and continuation of rewriting
1988 The Return of the Shadow (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.1)
1989 The Treason of Isengard (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.2)
1990 The War of the Ring (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.3)
1992 Sauron Defeated (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.4)
The development of The Lord of the Rings. Sauron Defeated also includes another version of the Númenor story.
1993 Morgoth's Ring (The Later Silmarillion, part one)
1994 The War of the Jewels (The Later Silmarillion, part two)
Post-Lord of the Rings efforts to revise the mythology for publication. Includes the controversial 'Myths Transformed' section, which documents how Tolkien's thoughts changed radically in the last years of his life.
1996 The Peoples of Middle-earth
Source material for the appendices in The Lord of the Rings and some more late writings related to The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.

Originally Posted by Godzil

A really good news to hear

So the 5th May we will have all the books about the Middle Earth?

[amjbrown]

I got The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and the Children of Hurin. Most of the typos are the clear result of poorly proofed optical scans of the books

I know that the author is struggling with the eReader version, and a fix to that is on the way. However, reading this thread, there are a lot of negative comments overall - I hope because happy customers are reading the books themselves!

I just wanted to give a strong counter view for newcomers to this site. I have bought (for the n-th time) The Hobbit and the combined trilogy in ePub format for my Sony reader. They are simply brilliant - really, really well done.

The images are fine, save the maps and family trees which are hard to read. I use Adobe Digital Editions to read those - then they are great. All the footnotes work perfectly, all the appendices are there, which is fantastic. I am missing the complete maps of Middle Earth and Gondor, and I hope this is an oversight, and will be fixed soon. We all need to mail Harper Collins!

But the clincher for me is this. Just over a year ago, I bought a cheap trilogy paperback on a whim at Heathrow. I had a long trip, several flights, I fancied reading it again, and I did read Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. I have been stuck on the Return of the King for ages, because the single volume is too big for shoving in my backpack for daily use. Now it's just another few megs on my reader - i.e. nothing

Couldn't be happier, and it looks as if Harper Collins are going to release everything over time. Good thinking - they are going to make a packet - and with quality like this they deserve to.

amjb

[HarryT]

I got The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and the Children of Hurin. Most of the typos are the clear result of poorly proofed optical scans of the books

I very much doubt that these books have been OCR'd; there has been an electronic version of at least LOTR and TH for several years now - read the "Note on the 50th Anniversary Edition text" at the start of LOTR for details.

[clee]

Originally Posted by Ea

That would be wonderful. You don't have to scan, a photo would be fine if that is easier. One reason I am interested, apart from the quality of the books themselves, is that the artist name "Ingahild Grathmer" is actually a pseudonym for HM Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. She's been a fan since she read the books when they were first published. However, I haven't been able to find out exactly what this mean: "Illustrations by Ingahild Grathmer, drawn by Eric Fraser" and how much it affects the final look. Does it mean that Eric Fraser has made new illustrations inspired by hers, or just inked in her original drawings. If I could see few (3-4) then I could get a better impression. They do have two examples on the Folio Soc. page, but the style doesn't look like what I would expect - I just don't know if they are representative for the book.

Stop press... I was just now looking for examples of what I expect, and stumbled over a site with four examples of promotional posters for an edition with the queen's drawings, and it says right on them that they are redrawn by Eric Fraser (http://www.qxl.dk/pris/antikviteter-...v/an567595504/) - image on the left. If that is representative of the books, then I'm sure I'd like to buy them. I'd still like to take advantage of your offer and see a few examples

You can see the scans from the pages here on Flickr:

http://flickr.com/gp/slashclee/0990C2

I scanned in the Moria illustration (the one from Tolkien in "A Journey in the Dark") from both the Houghton Mifflin paperback set I have and from the Folio Society edition. It should be pretty clear that even with the same source image, the quality is far superior on the Folio Society printing.

Edit: I did not scan in all of the illustrations - each book had at least one more full-size illustration, and there is an illustration for *every* chapter heading.

Looks like you could probably get them for 80GBP - http://www.hay-on-wyebooks.com/si/A17732.html

[Ea]

Originally Posted by clee

You can see the scans from the pages here on Flickr:

http://flickr.com/gp/slashclee/0990C2

I scanned in the Moria illustration (the one from Tolkien in "A Journey in the Dark") from both the Houghton Mifflin paperback set I have and from the Folio Society edition. It should be pretty clear that even with the same source image, the quality is far superior on the Folio Society printing.

Edit: I did not scan in all of the illustrations - each book had at least one more full-size illustration, and there is an illustration for *every* chapter heading.

Looks like you could probably get them for 80GBP - http://www.hay-on-wyebooks.com/si/A17732.html

Thanks very much for the scans - I think I should buy the set for my birthday

I can get them directly from the Folio society for 87 GBP though, so no reason to buy them used.

[sirbruce]

People on the Amazon boards are finding a lot of problems with the Kindle versions:

Beth A. Stireman says:
Example of problem....
In the hard copy, from the chapter "Shadow of the Past"
"The Enemy still lacks one thing to give him strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance......"
In the Kindle version....
"The Enemy still lacks one thing to and knowledge to beat down all resistance...."

Melinda Varian says:
Beth, one thing I've noticed is that wherever the word "Dunedain" should occur (with an acute accent on the "u"), what is actually shown is "Du" with a circumflex accent on the "u", and the next 19 characters are missing. For some examples, see these locations in the trilogy: 455-60, 460-65, and 24701-2.

[Buran]

Are any of these problems being addressed by Amazon as time goes on? I believe that you probably get the most recent version of a book available if you download it to your PC and sync via USB, or delete from Kindle and then re-download, since you've already purchased it.

I haven't started reading the trilogy on my Kindle yet - I've read it in print again recently and other books I've never read are prioritized. But I would hope that Amazon does clean them up before I start reading again.

It'd be nice if Unicode support were added -- that would get rid of a lot of these problems.

[clee]

Has anybody extracted just the cover images from, say, the epub edition? I'd really like to have the extracted image files...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

People on the Amazon boards are finding a lot of problems with the Kindle versions:

Beth A. Stireman says:
Example of problem....
In the hard copy, from the chapter "Shadow of the Past"
"The Enemy still lacks one thing to give him strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance......"
In the Kindle version....
"The Enemy still lacks one thing to and knowledge to beat down all resistance...."

This problem exists in the ePub edition.

Melinda Varian says:
Beth, one thing I've noticed is that wherever the word "Dunedain" should occur (with an acute accent on the "u"), what is actually shown is "Du" with a circumflex accent on the "u", and the next 19 characters are missing. For some examples, see these locations in the trilogy: 455-60, 460-65, and 24701-2.

I think this problem may be AZW specific. It does not exist in the ePub. Could be something with the conversion to AZW (my guess).

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by clee

Has anybody extracted just the cover images from, say, the epub edition? I'd really like to have the extracted image files...

Are the epub edition covers different from the MOBI ones?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Are the epub edition covers different from the MOBI ones?

I have the 3-in-1 edition of Lord of the Rings. Look at my avatar. It's the graphic from the cover.

[deltop]

I found both problems in my epub, the omnibus edition. However the problem with the word "Dúnedain" only seems to occur in the prologue and the footnotes. Just 3 or 4 instances in total so was easily fixed. 3 in the prologue and 1 in the footnotes file I think it was.

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I have the 3-in-1 edition of Lord of the Rings. Look at my avatar. It's the graphic from the cover.

I know, I sent you a message, remember? :P I'm wondering if the MOBI versions wouldn't work just as well for him.

[clee]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

I know, I sent you a message, remember? :P I'm wondering if the MOBI versions wouldn't work just as well for him.

I have the mobi versions but extracting the images out is a pain and from what I've read the epub covers are higher resolution.