Miscellaneous Musings about Books

[ScarletBea]

For all those little things about Fantasy books that don't fit anywhere else but also don't really deserve a thread of their own...

1. Publishing the same book "for children" and "for adults", with different covers and different prices

I'd been wanting to read the Earthsea stories, and I saw all 4 published in a single book, Penguin, price £16.99. This was just before Christmas, and a friend had asked me for suggestions, so I told her about this book. What I got was exactly the same content, same publisher, but under their children's inprint Puffin. Price? £10.99.
Why? It's not a bigger font, it doesn't have more or less pages, so I really don't get the price difference.
The cover art was more expensive in the adult book?


2. Usually worlds with 'nobles' and 'peasants' end up having the nobles ruling the peasants. Is there a book that turns this upside down, peasants ruling the nobles? Or are the words almost a prison, in that they imply the usual order?

[G_R_Matthews]

1. That is... strange!

2. I think the words denote the position eg. Noble = in charge. Though I suspect the communism may have tried to change that, strange though that the rich "peasants" always seem to end up in power

[Matthew Graybosch]

1. This is something publishers do because they can get away with it. I think you'll find that a lot of the weirder features of capitalism are bugs nobody cared enough to fix through competition, regulation, or legislation.

2. This one is harder to answer without digging into the etymologies behind the words "noble" and "peasant". The peasants are the people who actually have to work for a living, usually by farming. The nobles, on the other hand, don't have to work for a living. Instead, they're parasites who tax the peasants in exchange for "protecting" them.

[Overlord]

For all those little things about Fantasy books that don't fit anywhere else but also don't really deserve a thread of their own...

1. Publishing the same book "for children" and "for adults", with different covers and different prices

I'd been wanting to read the Earthsea stories, and I saw all 4 published in a single book, Penguin, price £16.99. This was just before Christmas, and a friend had asked me for suggestions, so I told her about this book. What I got was exactly the same content, same publisher, but under their children's inprint Puffin. Price? £10.99.
Why? It's not a bigger font, it doesn't have more or less pages, so I really don't get the price difference.
The cover art was more expensive in the adult book?

1. I like the book, but for Eon they did this… they even renamed it for adults!!! Incredibly, the following two images are both of the same book:

Young Adults:



Adults:



They did it for book 2 also:

Young Adults:



Adults:

[Jeni]

The YA covers for EON + EONA are waaaaay better than the adult ones!

I've had a copy of EON sinking lower and lower on my kindle tbr pile for ages, but now I've seen those covers it's moved right back up to near the top - thanks Overlord! 

[Elfy]

Terry Pratchett kind of turned point 1 around a bit. He realised that children as well as adults read his Discworld novels, so wrote the Bromeliad trilogy specifically for younger readers. It was marketed that way and priced accordingly. Plenty of adults (Lejays17 and I being among them) read them as well. He did a similar thing with his first novel The Carpet People, written when he was 17, when he found out that it had become rare and people were on library waiting lists for years to read it.
The peasants ruling the nobles? Well, i guess once you become the ruling class you change your thinking. The closest I can think of off the top of my head that did what SB is saying was Animal Farm, and that was an allegorical tale that Orwell wrote after attending the Big Three meeting towards the end of WW II and after a while being unable to tell the difference between the totalitarian dictator in Stalin and the democratically elected leaders in Churchill and Roosevelt.

[Overlord]

The YA covers for EON + EONA are waaaaay better than the adult ones!

I've had a copy of EON sinking lower and lower on my kindle tbr pile for ages, but now I've seen those covers it's moved right back up to near the top - thanks Overlord! 

It is a really good book :-) I actually leant it to my girlfriend's mother and she really liked it (and the sequel) too. What I liked about it was that it is a rare example of an Asian setting using a first person female POV… It felt very fresh and unlike anything I'd read before. I guess if I had to try and compare it to something I'd say Sabriel/Lirael in terms of tone and story, but the narrative and setting are so very different that even that is a stretch

[ScarletBea]

Another one:

* I think I might have found my "having the cake and eating it"
- I want to support my local bookshops (Waterstone's... nothing independent, but still, bricks and mortar shop), but I don't really like paying the full price (who does?). They hardly ever have the books I want on the 'buy 1 get 1 half price', so I'm tempted to buy online.
However yesterday I discovered 'reserve & collect' - you go online, reserve, then go collect the books from the actual shop, paying the cheaper online price but the sale counts as the bookshop sale (I know, I asked).
Of course, this only works if the shop you want has the book you want in stock, but I've got lots of options around me, if not exactly in my home town, then a few around.

[ladybritches]

For all those little things about Fantasy books that don't fit anywhere else but also don't really deserve a thread of their own...

1. Publishing the same book "for children" and "for adults", with different covers and different prices

I'd been wanting to read the Earthsea stories, and I saw all 4 published in a single book, Penguin, price £16.99. This was just before Christmas, and a friend had asked me for suggestions, so I told her about this book. What I got was exactly the same content, same publisher, but under their children's inprint Puffin. Price? £10.99.
Why? It's not a bigger font, it doesn't have more or less pages, so I really don't get the price difference.
The cover art was more expensive in the adult book?

The paper is better quality? Who knows what they're thinking, but if they changed the title on me and I ended up buying the same book twice, I'd be pretty steamed.  I'm a tightwad so I look for the best bargain, but if the cheaper books are thick little trade paperbacks or something, I might pay a little extra for bigger and easier to hold. Especially if it's a book I'm likely to reread.

2. Usually worlds with 'nobles' and 'peasants' end up having the nobles ruling the peasants. Is there a book that turns this upside down, peasants ruling the nobles? Or are the words almost a prison, in that they imply the usual order?

Nobles are the ruling class and peasants are the laborers, so the writer would probably be better off just making up new words for the classes if he wanted to change the rules. Otherwise people like me would get confused.

[ScarletBea]

* What is it with guys and how they dress in the Mistborn books?
Everything looks normal and like the usual world except that.
One wears a vest all the time - fine, he's sloppy.
Others wear suits and vests, but no shirts... - why would you wear a suit just with a vest? Must feel really unconfortable, and it doesn't match with his noble position.
And then the worst are the ones who end up putting on shirts, but *under* their vests! Why?
 

[xiagan]

Uhm... Where would you put a shirt if not under the vest? Certainly not above the vest...

[Idlewilder]

There are different types of vests...

See medieval/fantasy type vest:




and the infinitely more horrifying Rab C Nesbitt vest (undershirt):

[sennydreadful]

I think also there's a difference between the US and the UK idea of a vest - in that Americans have these sweater vest things (they look cute and I want one) which go over a shirt, and British people have vests as a sort of extra layer of warmth under your normal clothes. And they are less appealing.

[xiagan]

I have a vest like the medieval one from windy's pic I wear with a suit. The other thing is a sleeveless shirt, not a vest.

[Idlewilder]

I have a vest like the medieval one from windy's pic I wear with a suit. The other thing is a sleeveless shirt, not a vest.

Ha! No, believe me - it is not a sleeveless shirt. It is a string vest and it is disgusting.