it has e-begun

[jazzfish]

Over vacation I read Charles Stross's six- three-volume Merchant Princes series. They're good stuff. The first one's a normal SF worldwalker book, and the next two are much more contemporary thrillers that happen to include a worldwalking component. Also, the twin central messages are 'Economic development is tricky' and 'Stop romanticising the past.'

They are also, as Charlie noted, big fat books. I mostly didn't notice this, because ereaders are a thing of lightweight beauty.

Over the weekend I got a desire to reread Umberto Eco's big thick secret-history Foucault's Pendulum. My copy is a giant hardback, because it looks nice on my shelf and because when I was carrying a large backpack around campus one more big book didn't really make a difference.

Now? I am genuinely *irritated* that I can't just open it on the iPad. Instead I have to deal with a physical volume that causes me physical strain to hold in one hand, and that doesn't fit in my coat pocket. I am almost (almost) considering plopping down more money for an ebook edition.

I suppose this is how 'and then i replaced my library with ebooks' starts.

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Two quotes about Foucault's Pendulum:

1) "Dan Brown is a character in my book." --Umberto Eco, on being repeatedly asked if he'd read The Da Vinci Code
2) "Nobody gets Foucault's Pendulum except for literary critics and role-players." --James Palmer

Comments

[jazzfish]

I read the first two when they were first released, and thought they were good but not good enough to own in hardback. Then I stopped working at a bookstore and didn't get around to picking up the others for awhile. Eventually I started grabbing them in paperback (used), and uilos read them and decreed them "meh." I suspected this was a combination of thrillers being Not Her Thing and the weird inflationary effect of the series plan changing from two books to six, so when Charlie went back and revised and edited them for the three-book rerelease, I kept an eye out for them.

Verdict: still not worth owning in hardback, so it's just as well they're not being released in hardback. Worth owning in trade paperback or in ebook. Looking forward to the completion of the sequel book-published-in-three-covers.