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Comment by fabian2k | Hacker News Reader

Another pretty consumer-hostile thing German publishers sometimes do is to split books into multiple parts in the German version. This does have a legitimate reason in some cases as the German version will be longer and you can hit some limits on book size with already large books. But I've also seen it in cases where it was clearly artificial. And it results in essentially 2-3x the price for the same book, because of course each German book part costs around the same as the original full book.

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In Bosnia in the 80s, I read this novel which was amazing but confusing.

Decade later, I learned it was the middle third of the Original dune novel, starting literally in the middle of Harkonnen attack, as they ponder the ancient cannons without any mention of shields etc.

It was quite the trip :-)

I don't think it was hostile though. I think it had to do with this one guy / club doing the translating and needing both time to do the work, and money from first part to live through / finance the next part. I could be wrong, I was 10 at the time...

I read the third book of the Zelazny's Amber series before I read the second, back when the series was new. I didn't do it on purpose, but I wasn't careful to avoid the risk either.

That was the first time in my life I read three novels the same day. It was 2 days before qualifying exams for my PhD. 1 day beforehand I was going to cram, but the day before that I wanted to clear my brain.

First time I read The Lord of the Rings, I was 12 or so, my dad was reading The Two Towers, my older brother was reading The Fellowship of the Ring, so I decided I should just start reading The Return of the King.

So my first memories of LotR are Pippin riding Shadowfax behind Gandalf.

When my dad finished book 2, I dropped book 3 and switched, and then to book 1 when my brother finished the first book, so that was a bit of a fragmented experience.

Maybe there's also a lesson here to read books with your kids, or at least where they can see you read. It's contagious.

My dad ended up buying the famous pirate Ace version of the Fellowship of the Ring - and it had absolutely no indication it was the first part of a combined trilogy so he thought it has a VERY abrupt weird ending until he later learned there were other volumes.

My dad had all three, my mom had only the first (of the same edition), so we had two copies of Fellowship at home. I guess I should have started in the other copy, except when I started we were on vacation and we didn't bring the duplicate Fellowship with us.

My wife tells me that Russian publishers sometimes just translated a whole series...and then kept "translating" books that didn't exist. She only found that out after coming to America, trying to read the originals, and finding that what she thought of as the books at the end of various series often didn't EXIST in the original.

French publishers do (or did at one point anyway) the same thing. For instance the first section of realm of the elderlings (3 trilogies, so 9 volumes) was published as 19 volumes.

And for some reason a few years later they republished it in only 7, which is just as insane (they literally cut in the middle of the 5th volume).

Really shows how much these industries respect the actual art involved.

There was (still is?) a French law that mandates the maximum sales price for soft-cover/paperback books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law (if you can read it, the French version of that wikipedia article is much more detailed). The intent behind the law being to attempt to keep "culture" accessible to all incomes, notably by preventing resellers from price-gouging books at the expense of the publisher(s).

This has resulted in many larger tomes being split up when translated to French - for example, the first 5 (English/Original) volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire are sold as 15 (translated to French) books in total : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Tr%C3%B4ne_de_fer#Publicati...

I am also very disappointed at how often French publishers seem to decide that they can chop up these stories willy-nilly without it degrading the quality of the art (re-)productions that they are selling us.

The price is fixed by the editor, there is no state mandated price.

The purpose of the law is to have the same price for a book in every bookshop (with a 5% discount possible). This was supposed to help small booksellers, who could not compete against big corporations. And it kinda worked, as there are more than 3500 independent bookshops in the country.

The split up is not linked to the uniform price, I think it's more a cultural thing.

no the french law is to protect publishers and libraries by setting a minimum price for books :(

and now they've updated it to say you can't offer delivery for less than 3 euros...

Do you have an example?

I'm aware of books, which come in three volumes and this seems completely unnecessary. Subutex by Virginie Despentes comes to mind but that was already in the original.

I'm not aware of a German trilogy, which wasn't a trilogy in its original edition.

Thus, genuinly curious.

They did this with the "Song of Ice and Fire" (i.e. Game of Thrones) books for example. If you look at the translations here:

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?4543

You will see two titles for German, French, Italian for each one title in English but only one each in Spanish and Russian. In the former cases, the story was split into two books with different titles.

Thanks!

And the last volume consists entirely of verbs ...

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