Books you gave up on ever being ebooks

[NNolan]

The works of Zenna Henderson eventually became ebooks, as did Evangeline Walton's Mabinogion, but I still can't find any ebooks by Jane Gaskell. Bummer.

[ElspethB]

Oooh, thanks for mentioning Zenna Henderson! I didn't know her books had become ebooks.

ETA:

And I just discovered one of my libraries has Ingathering: The Complete People Stores. O frabjous day!

[issybird]

I’ve posted in the Reading Recommendations thread, but I’ll also bump this to note that Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is being released in ebook format tomorrow.

Could Marguerite Yourcenar’s The Memoirs of Hadrian be next?

[Frogm4n]

Finally! Must be the 50 year anniversary and the coverage by 99% Invisible that has raised enought interest in getting it into an ebook format. I'm still a bit surprised that it took this long since even his LBJ books are available as ebooks.

[foosion]

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. One of the most cited analyses of Shakespeare. An ebook version would be nice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakes...n_of_the_Human

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by foosion

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. One of the most cited analyses of Shakespeare. An ebook version would be nice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakes...n_of_the_Human

Harold Bloom died in 2019. His works don't enter the life+70 public domain until 1st January 2090.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Harold Bloom died in 2019. His works don't enter the life+70 public domain until 1st January 2090.

He didn't mention public domain at all. All it needs is for the current copyright owners to see money in an ebook edition. They probably won't, but that's another matter.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Harold Bloom died in 2019. His works don't enter the life+70 public domain until 1st January 2090.

The poster's not looking for public domain/free but a legal ebook that can be purchased.

Edit: ninja'd by mbovenka.

[Cactus Chef]

Red Moon and Black Mountain would be nice, based on some of the recommendations for the book I read on this forum. I did "find" an ebook of it online, but it was clearly OCR'd, and it had some obnoxious formatting issues that would've taken me longer to fix in the EPUB than to read the book.

Would be nice to throw a few bucks the author's way via an official ebook release, since she appears to still be alive.

[foosion]

Originally Posted by mbovenka

He didn't mention public domain at all. All it needs is for the current copyright owners to see money in an ebook edition. They probably won't, but that's another matter.

Originally Posted by issybird

The poster's not looking for public domain/free but a legal ebook that can be purchased.

Edit: ninja'd by mbovenka.

Exactly. Given how often it's cited and how influential the book is (within its genre), it would be nice to have an ebook version. Some of his books are available as ebooks, but it appears most are not, at least based on looking at Amazon US.

Is conversion that expensive, especially compared to a print run?

[mitford13]

Originally Posted by Frogm4n

Finally! Must be the 50 year anniversary and the coverage by 99% Invisible that has raised enought interest in getting it into an ebook format. I'm still a bit surprised that it took this long since even his LBJ books are available as ebooks.

There’s some nice background here on the long road to digital…
And second article on the anniversary.
(gift articles courtesy of my library )

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/b...smid=url-share

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/b...smid=url-share

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by foosion

Exactly. Given how often it's cited and how influential the book is (within its genre), it would be nice to have an ebook version. Some of his books are available as ebooks, but it appears most are not, at least based on looking at Amazon US.

Is conversion that expensive, especially compared to a print run?

Apologies. I thought I'd deleted my comment, when I realised I was it was in this thread and not a different one.

It does seem that books published just before ebooks became common have slipped through the gaps.

[foosion]

Originally Posted by mitford13

There’s some nice background here on the long road to digital…
And second article on the anniversary.
(gift articles courtesy of my library )

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/b...smid=url-share

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/b...smid=url-share

Two quotes I found interesting from the first article:

“If you’re reading along and there’s a typo, it ruins the mood,” he added. “It’s not just typos. Spacing between paragraphs or sections is very important to my rhythm, and the spaces were so insignificant in the old e-books that they didn’t stop you. I wanted the space to stop the reader, that’s why I put it there.”

I hadn't though seriously about spacing between paragraphs as being large enough to stop the reader. I tend to consider large spaces annoying and make them smaller (but I don't remove the "***" or whatever between paragraphs). Also, after a break, paragraphs tend to be flush left rather than indented, which helps one notice the "pause".

I don't believe the larger space causes me to slow down and think more than shorter spaces.

Typos do disrupt my reading rhythm.

"The entire manuscript had to be retyped — a process that was outsourced to a word processing vendor in Chennai, India. Then the new digital text had to be proofread against the print edition to make sure no errors had been introduced."

That would make ebook conversion much more expensive. I wonder when books started to be submitted digitally rather than on paper (realizing even in the digital age some authors likely prefer paper).

Apologies if this is off topic.

[foosion]

Oddly, there's an epub for the Spanish translation of the Harold Bloom book: https://nypl.overdrive.com/media/5147788. There's also a text pdf (not a scan) of the English version out there, which suggests producing an ebook shouldn't be that difficult.

[Frogm4n]

Originally Posted by mitford13

(gift articles courtesy of my library )

Thanks for the links! I did the only proper thing about the situation and saved them to Pocket to read on my Kobo later.