images1.jpegYesterday evening I conceived an overwhelming desire to re-read Per Wahloo‘s series of mysteries set in Stockholm and featuring the police detective Martin Beck.  I don’t know what I did with the hard copies, so I searched for an ebook – no luck.  That lead me to look for some other books I would like to have in ebook form.  In each case they were not available.  Some of my choices were:

Will Durant:  The Story of Civilization

Glen Cook: the Black Company series

Stephen Donaldson: the orginal Thomas Covenant series

Simon Green: Shadows Fall

and many others.

What are the books you would like to see as ebooks, but which are not currently available?

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8 COMMENTS

  3. What books would I like to see made available as ebooks? Well, how about….

    All the works of the following writers:
    Fritz Leiber, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Heinlein, Charles Beaumont, Joe Haldeman, John O’Hara, James M. Cain, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Bashevis Singer, George Orwell, Roald Dahl, William Goldman, Roger Zelazny, Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, Stephen King, Joseph Epstein, Gerald Kersh, Tabitha King, Theodore Sturgeon, Thomas Williams, Jon Hassler, Don Robertson, Russell Kirk, John D. MacDonald, Barry Malzberg, Jack Finney, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, C. M. Kornbluth, Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore, J. G. Ballard, Richard Russo, Tim O’Brien, Ray Bradbury, Dan Simmons, Irwin Shaw, Michel de Montaigne (Frame translation and Screech translation), the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations of Dostoevsky & Tolstoy, Jack Vance, Victor Davis Hanson, Fredric Brown, Ross MacDonald, Poul Anderson, Gordon Dickson, Arthur C. Clarke, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Wallace Stegner, Walter Tevis, Charles L. Grant, Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Georges Simenon, Jorge Luis Borges (di Giovanni translations as well as the recent 3 volume omnibus from Viking), Alfred Bester, Ruth Rendell, Cornell Woolrich, Jacques Barzun, W. Somerset Maugham, Richard Matheson, Bernard Wolfe, J. D. Salinger, Jim Thompson, John Collier, Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Cornelius Hirschberg’s THE PRICELESS GIFT…..

    And I’ve only mentioned Borges of all the Latin Americans who should be out there as well — Marquez, Cortazar, Amado, Vargas Llosa, and more.

    And lines such as Modern Library, Everymans Library, and Library of America should be published in e as well as print form as a matter of course; ditto the Signet, Penguin and Bantam Classics lines. It also wouldn’t hurt to see the Viking Portables reissued as ebooks.

    Haven’t even mentioned all the good poets and playwrights, and the above list is by no means exhaustive, but you get the idea.

    A number of the writers listed above have some of their titles available, but not nearly all, and some of these writers don’t show a single ebook available.

    I don’t buy into the notion that we should be embracing ebooks to help save the environment given the impact of manufacturing all the electronic gizmos we use to read them. But part of the appeal of e is in the fact that with the books stored digitally, there’s no reason for them not to be widely available. Too much backlist can be bought only through used book dealers. If publishers buy into the “Long Tail” notion, they should realize that backlist is a big part of that long tail and that e is probably the most cost-efficient way of making it available. The presence of more backlist might be one way of boosting wider acceptance of the notion of ebooks. When I started buying ebooks I looked for some current releases, but most of the material I was looking for when I checked out ebook sites was backlist material, and I don’t believe I’m unique.

    Nearly all the writers listed above have been published and then reissued and reissued and reissued again and again, but often with a gap of several years or more between printings. Would the permanent availability of ebook editions make a difference not just in the faster adoption of ebooks but also in publishers’ bottom lines? And in some of the writers’ bottom lines as well?

    Bests,

    –tr

  4. I would love to see a French textbook. There is a commons-licensed one out there, but only in PDF. I would also like to see some elementary French readers. I’d love to have a few easy reads on my ebookwise that I can manage without a dictionary.

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