Young Wizards Series: 38% bundle discount

[pdurrant]

Diane Duane is now offering all nine of her Young Wizards series to non-US readers for a bundle price of $39.99. That's over 23% off the combined individual prices.

But she's also now offering them in a combined ePub/Kindle bundle (where you get to download both formats, both DRM-free), and has a 20% off discount code, BUNDLE, that means the end price is just $31.99 — only $3.56 per book.

The combined discounts add up to 38% off the price of buying the individual books.

Have I mentioned that these are a really excellent Young Adult fantasy series? Go and get them at this bargain price — you'll enjoy them.

http://ebooksdirect.dianeduane.com/c...n-complete-set


(from Teleread)

[sufue]

I thought I'd add that I found that using the coupon code was pretty non-intuitive.

There isn't any immediately obvious place to enter it at the start. It turns out that you don't actually enter it until the very end, many screens into the purchase process, and I kept thinking that I was going to end up buying the bundle at "full bundle" price.

But, it there IS a place to enter it and it DOES work eventually - but not until after you go through the whole PayPal process and get sent back to the main website.

There are instructions on how to use it here:

http://ebooksdirect.dianeduane.com/p...discount-codes

and you just have to have faith that eventually you'll get to enter it

[pdurrant]

Thanks for the clarification, sufue. I hope you enjoy the books. Have you read any of them before?

[EsperKnight]

I already have some of them in epub format when they started releasing them finally in ebook format but missing a couple as they skipped some (High Wizardy was one and I think 7 and another one) but this is incredibly awesome. I love these books and will gladly repurchase them. Thanks for posting this!

[ficbot]

According to a post from Teleread, these books are still unfortunately plagued with errors. The poster said there are about 25-100 per book. That's disappointing. I know there are DRM-free and could therefore be easily corrected in Sigil, but I really don't want to spend my reading time as a copyeditor.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by ficbot

According to a post from Teleread, these books are still unfortunately plagued with errors. The poster said there are about 25-100 per book. That's disappointing. I know there are DRM-free and could therefore be easily corrected in Sigil, but I really don't want to spend my reading time as a copyeditor.

If you mean this post from March 2011, it's referring to the versions from the US publishers.

I can confirm that the ones referenced in this thread do not have the typos mentioned in that article. I did find one or two typos reading through the first seven books, but they were few and far between, certainly better than most other ebooks from any source.

[sourcejedi]

No, ficbot means my comment on the the TeleRead post (scroll to end).
Note that that's the closest I've seen anyone come to a public complaint. My reaction is not the normal one.

Suggestion: They're available in the Kindle store, which includes free samples. Install the Safari or Chrome browser, and you should be able to read the sample in Amazon's new Cloud Reader. Then you can make your own judgment.

If you're not a copy-editor, most of the glitches won't bother you. You'll read through half of them without even noticing anything. (Don't believe me? Count the word "the" in the first sentence of this post :-).

20-100 total errata, with less than 5 "real word errors", is surprisingly tolerable. The count includes stuff like spaces around quotation marks, and everything I found afterwards using Project Gutenberg style semi-automated checks. Closer to acne than a plague, I think. It's better than the publisher's first effort (and much better than Google scans of public domain books!).

The "real word error" count also overstates the problem slightly; they include some textbook "stealth scannos". I didn't notice "comer" for "corner" when I was reading it. And I don't think I would have noticed "bum" for "burn" if I wasn't making notes. (What's most disturbing is not the way it changes the meaning of the sentence. It's that if you realize there's a mistake, the word seems to keep flipping back to the correct spelling. It's freakier than the the doubled word thing).

I just didn't think it was fair to leave the impression that the International versions (or at least the first three) were free of "typos". Since I reported the errors, I was able to put a rough figure on it. Sorry if the numbers give the wrong impression, but I'm not sure how else to put it.


... and I can try to put it in context, but it's difficult to know how it affects different people. Multiple people rated the original version of GCA from Webscription.net highly. When I came to read it, the ebook was crippled by hundreds of missing paragraph breaks and spurious paragraph breaks where there shouldn't have been. I wasn't able to read [I]that[/I book without feeling like I'd turned into a copy-editor.

If you're happy with the backlist sci-fi from E-reads, I don't think you'll have a problem. When I looked at Anvil of Stars from fictionwise/e-reads, it worked out as somewhere upwards of 20 errors. (And that's excluding the quotation marks, which alternate randomly between straight and curly quotes).

I could post the patches for the first three books, if anyone wants to play with them. (unzip, patch, zip). That'd cover the individual errors I suggested corrections for. (It'd exclude any general formatting issues, for example). Also, I think the "human readable" (ish) versions I sent to the author give a fairly good idea of what to expect.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by sourcejedi

I could post the patches for the first three books, if anyone wants to play with them. (unzip, patch, zip). That'd cover the individual errors I suggested corrections for. (It'd exclude any general formatting issues, for example). Also, I think the "human readable" (ish) versions I sent to the author give a fairly good idea of what to expect.

I'd be interested to see the patches. Twenty to 100 minor errors and up to five real-word errors is a lot better than most books, but I'd be pleased to improve my copies.

I sent in some errata to the web site too. I suspect the fixed versions will come in a few months, when hopefully the vast majority of the remaining errors will have been spotted.

[sourcejedi]

#1
Errata affect 80 paragraphs.
83 insertions, 92 deletions.

2x wrong word, 1x missing word
5x "1" for "I".
etc.

#2: ~45 errata
At least two wrong words (rather/father, wit/with).
Does not include instructions for removing soft hyphen characters.

#3: ~80 errata
At least two wrong words (bum/burn, nave/have) and one missing word (light).

[DJHARKAVY]

Thank you for this. I love to see an author releasing their back works, especially a series that I enjoy so much.

Originally Posted by EsperKnight

I already have some of them in epub format when they started releasing them finally in ebook format but missing a couple as they skipped some (High Wizardy was one and I think 7 and another one) but this is incredibly awesome. I love these books and will gladly repurchase them. Thanks for posting this!

I had two of them as epubs, and the hardcover omnibus edition of the first six (IIRC, as the hardcovers did not survive a move) as well as three of them on audible.com.

My son loves these books as much as I do. I am glad that he will get to read them.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by sourcejedi

#1
Errata affect 80 paragraphs.
83 insertions, 92 deletions.

2x wrong word, 1x missing word
5x "1" for "I".
etc.

#2: ~45 errata
At least two wrong words (rather/father, wit/with).
Does not include instructions for removing soft hyphen characters.

#3: ~80 errata
At least two wrong words (bum/burn, nave/have) and one missing word (light).

Thanks for these. That's a lot of work you've put in on them.

[jjmgreen]

Meh, international version - can't buy in the US. Too bad, I'd like to
have e-copies of these, and prefer non-DRM. Looks like I could get
DRM versions from bookstores

[starrigger]

I grabbed the set. Diane and I got started in our careers at about the same time, with the same editor and publisher, and I've always loved this series. (As did my daughter.) I never got to the later ones, and this is a perfect chance. There's a certain canine in the books who bears more than a passing resemblance to a dog I once had.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by jjmgreen

Meh, international version - can't buy in the US. Too bad, I'd like to
have e-copies of these, and prefer non-DRM. Looks like I could get
DRM versions from bookstores

Yes, you can get the international version in the U.S. I just purchased it using a U.S. credit card and address.

[sourcejedi]

Unlike the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editions of the Young Wizards ebooks presently available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble Online, which can only be purchased and downloaded by readers in North America, our ebook editions of the original YW novels can be purchased by readers in all other parts of the world.

Emphasis mine. The general rule is that publishing contracts require exclusive rights; there's nothing to suggest an exception here.

If it turned out the International versions were also being bought in the US, I'm sure she'd appreciate a private message. From someone other than the publishers' lawyers. (It has come to our attention...)

Some of you will have noticed that I’ve been overseeing a project whose time (I think) has come — international editions of the Young Wizards novels. The YW books’ North American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, only holds publishing rights for the US and its possessions, Canada and (for whatever reason) the Philippines. When UK YW fans (who had print editions in the early 90′s) complained to me that they couldn’t purchase the books from Amazon in their ebook editions, I checked with my agent’s contract lady to make sure that self-published ebooks would be kosher, and then started to see what I needed to do about it.

...With the YW books I was forced into a situation that Smashwords could not be used to solve, due to the territorial restrictions attached to the works.