Today, author Joe Abercrombie announced that his new book, Best Served Cold will be released in the US on the Kindle. I have found the Kindle app on my iPod Touch to be very readable on the largest font setting and with the inverse color scheme (white text on a black background). Despite this, I still prefer to listen to books than read them. It saves eyestrain and often the narration is qutie good.
Joe Abercrombie’s debut dark fantasy trilogy, The Frist Law, caught my attention in the bookstore when the first book came out here in the US. I read the first chapter in the bookstore cafe, took it home and jut could not put it down. There were no electronic or audio editions. The books were released early in the UK, so I had a friend pick me up the next two while he was visiting. These are a few of the very short list of fiction books I have read in paper in the last decade. As I noted in Best Served Cold, I have occasionally pestered the author by email about releasing audio version. Joe has been incredibly responsive to my requests, but the hold up has always been with the publisher’s control of the audio rights.
There is good news. In response to a comment of mine on today’s Kindle edition announcement, Joe announced that the logjam blocking the audio edition has been broken. “Audiobook rights for the First Law were sold quite a while ago, in fact, but they seem to be in development hell at the minute due to a dispute between Orion, my uk publisher, and Audible, the US distributor of unabridged audiobooks. I believe that was resolved, though, so they should appear at some point. When, I couldn’t say.” Still no release date, but I will continue to lobby Audible to hurry their recording process.
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[...] and about my quest to have them released as audio books (See Best Served Cold (& Audible), The First Law Series Going Audible and Best Served Audible). Abercrombie reports today on his blog in “First Law [...]