Completely meaningless given the habit here, but I “announce” I’ll not write about books coming from big publishers unless they are at least three years old.
I’m done supporting this shit.
Only mentioning here the recent Sanderson big book was out the 7th December. The American Tor edition, 10 days later, is completely unavailable in Europe. Not because the copies have been sold out due to demand, but because they were NEVER SHIPPED. Due to a market agreement with the UK publisher. Which is funny since the UK isn’t part of the EU, so why should it monopolize its market?
Not even touching how the cost of books hasn’t simply increased, but multiplied x3 in three years. Reading has become an hobby for the rich.
But still, it’s funny.
My order was just 26 euros at the time, and is currently suspended since no copies were shipped to Europe. Meanwhile the UK edition is available everywhere. In Italian online shops the American edition is delisted, it won’t come up even with specific searches using the ISBN.
I don’t really care, I’m still something like 150 pages into the second book, it’s quite probable I’ll never get to the point of reading the fifth. I just despise this whole situation.
Roll back a few years, I remember clearly I ordered the American hardback of Words of Radiance, it was shipped by Amazon early and arrived one day before even the American launch date. I wrote a post about it.
Years later, Oathbringer took a week to get delivered. Then Amazon killed The Book Depository, in order to better serve its own monopoly.
I’m sorry for the writers, obviously, but I hope these publishers go burn in hell. Bye.
(meanwhile, it took a full year but I got all 15 main books part of Michelle West giant saga, all bought as used copies with the exception of the most recent, that had to be self-published anyway. And so I had to go support her directly on Patreon)
EDIT:
The book arrived on 23 December. On Amazon the book currently looks still unavailable and sold at an insane price, so I suppose they are fulfilling the orders they already have while trying to discourage new ones.
So time for the traditional book review, of the book itself as an object.
Starting from the price. I have all the original hardcover, so I can list them as they were:
– The Way of Kings: $27.99 August 2010
– Words of Radiance: $28.99 March 2013
– Oathbringer: $34.99 November 2017
– Rhythm of War: $34.99 November 2020
– Wind and Truth: $39.99 December 2024
A note about the “acknowledgement” page, it was usually quite long and interesting to read. In book 5 it’s still long, but it became just a simple list of names.
The cover illustrations, I like Whelan well enough, but his illustrations are hit and miss for me. Certain ones are exceptional, others not so much. The cover of the first book is impersonal and with nice colors. I like it, it feels like the dawn of a new series. It gives a nice sense of scale and the worst thing about it is that it’s all covered by words. Also, that style of more lean armors looks way better than the bulkier weird things that got shown afterwards. The second book cover is instead quite terrible, which is funny because the colored internal illustration, again by Whelan and depicting Shallan is WAY better and should have been on the cover. The cover itself is of a bland and of a sickly yellow, the illustration lacks detail. It’s just bad. The one for the third book is okay, but the sword looks weird, and then it’s just a plain, anonymous wall with a swirly thing that seems to come from her hand but not really. The illustration is fine, the subject chosen quite bad. The fourth book is good, it has good colors once again, it is weird in a good way, but it feels some kind of threshold left/right. Too rigid. It suffers a bit for not feeling a real organic landscape, but something cut and pasted. And here it comes the last book, that seems to recall the first, but failing. The colors are all washed out, it would have looked better with more contrast. The platform takes too much space and looks plain. The whirlpool thing is all unaligned for some reason, the “eye” at the top, the cone below and the hand. The mountainous environment makes for a more oppressive place compared to the first cover, but it’s also more common and anonymous. It’s an okay cover for a fantasy book, just not a good one.
From the third book, the soft cover “fold over”, however it’s called, got a colored map of the world. Print quality got actually better here. Makes a jump between book 3 and 4, but it is again slightly better in book 5, with crispier colors.
It’s good they kept a consistent style through all the books, but the spine of the fold over went from an horizontal title to a vertical one, from Oathbringer onward (if publishers knew what they were doing, they’d sell updated folds over as an accessory, people would buy them). But if you remove it, the actual hardcover is consistent all the way through, looking really nice side by side. Book 2 stands out because it’s quite thicker, despite the lower number of pages, as we’ll see later.
For the internal cover illustrations, the first book had maps, with excellent printing quality, the second book has a spread illustration looking really good, from the third you get these tarot-like illustrations, but last two books the printing quality is not as good because the illustrations are way too dark and lacking detail because of it. Probably more directly related to the original illustrations being overall darker in this last book, that doesn’t translate well on paper.
A note about the “hard” cover, and product quality in general. The books became progressively more expensive, but feeling a bit cheaper in quality as well. The hard cover in this last volume is actually thinner than book 4, you can feel it. But even overall, the binding, the paper, it all got cheaper.
As written above, when you look at them side by side book 2 is the bigger by far, merely because it uses similar paper of the first, but slightly heavier. From book 3 onward the paper is of a different kind, smoother, but got another downgrade with this book 5. That’s why despite being 1300 pages it still look just as thick as the previous, the paper is almost a veil, extremely light. This seems to affect printing quality as well. Looking at the black and white map at the beginning, the printing quality across all volumes got progressively worse, and especially bad in this last volume. The coasts all around the continent have become an unreadable deep-grey smudge. Though it could be unrelated and simply a random variation of the printing process, hard to say if it’s actually a difference from book to book or just between printed batches of the same. The rest of the illustrations spread through the pages look generally fine.
I’ve watched already some non-spoiler reviews on youtube, enough to actually have a good idea of what’s the deal. I don’t like the constricting nature of the 10 days structure and it’s usually a bad idea in general because the story has less room, no matter how large is the timespan. It puts things on rails and as a reading experience it feels diminished. But I’ll also link some comments by Werthead that were both quite scathing and funny to read. Whether positive or partially negative, all I heard about the book is quite aligned.
Overall, could be better and could be worse (still commenting just on the physical object here, not the story). In the end they kept the style and it’s acceptably consistent. And for me (I’m perpetually 160 pages into the second book and every several months I start again from page 1, but I like that initial part overall better than all of book 1), it’s nice knowing that whenever I feel like there’s so much to still read and space to stretch.
