3 ms·
There seems to be a weird reluctance in the American publishing market to split larger books into volumes. "War and Peace" editions I see on Amazon are typicall
by akho 5y ago
There seems to be a weird reluctance in the American publishing market to split larger books into volumes. "War and Peace" editions I see on Amazon are typically single-volume; Russian editions are either two or four volumes.
Unfortunately, translated books are (in most cases) published in the same way as the original, so the tradition of multi-volume editions is dying out, being replaced by these awful bricks you can't properly hold or keep open, all set in tiny type with narrow margins.
- asdff 5y agoI think part of that is the fractured expectations that publishers have set upon readers, especially of these longer classics. You have all these editions, translations, etc., sometimes of dramatically different page number lengths, with no standard or clear way to differentiate between different printings without diving into some literature forum where the users have read both copies and can summarize these differences for you. It can be hard to know you are actually getting the whole thing without buying a huge tome explicitly.
- akho 5y agoNah, it’s just cheaper to print (small type), bind (once, and badly), and to manage inventory in some edge cases.