We have some wonderful news regarding the recently mentioned Sarah Jane Adventures
Penguin books. Many of you expressed your disappointment to us about the books having been pulled before hitting shelves. Although this is still true, Penguin won't be releasing the stories as paperbacks; they've not been scrapped altogether! There's always a silver lining out there somewhere.
Penguin will instead be releasing The Nightmare Man and Death of the Doctor on November 4th as eBooks!
The books will go on sale at £4.99 each and will be the first eBooks of their kind from the BBC, specially aimed at the children's market. Following their hopeful success, Penguin will be releasing Doctor Who Decide your Destiny and Darksmith titles as eBooks next year.
16 comments:
Ooooh, I'm torn-while I'm glad that they are surviving in some form, I'm kinda a book snob-I like my physical books! ;)
I agree with you totally! I adore paperbacks, but I am glad the stories will still be coming out.
Well presumably they'd already been written when they pulled them. It'd have been a waste not to make them ebooks instead.
Joe Lidster, who wrote the Nightmare Man said that he'd never written and ebook before. He didn't know they were going to be made to ebooks and thought it was really cool LOL
I'd call that a plus - a few days ago, we didn't think we'd see them. At least we'll have something!
As far as I'm concerned, they're still not coming out. E-books are not permanent, can only be read as long as the software supports it. I don't mind it being an option, but I can't believe anyone sane actually thinks this is a good idea. I can reach over right now and pick up my copy of Dr. Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks from 1964 and read it. Does anyone really believe that these books will be preserved in the same way? This is a dangerous precedent. I do NOT WANT to see any Doctor Who novels released as e-books only. It's stupid.
Anonymous, I concur. Whilst I'm SOOOO glad the novelisations are getting released in some form, we can more or less kiss goodbye any chance of SJA novelisations being commissioned in the future, due to the low sales that'll no doubt result from this decision. How many members of the target audience do you think will have the ability to not only purchase the novelisations online, but read an eBook? I wonder how much thought actually went into going down the eBook avenue? I somehow doubt 10-year-old's will have an iPad :P
Re Nabu San (same Anonymous here):
I'm honestly scared that this is going to result in Doctor Who books going the same way. If that happens, they're done as far as I'm concerned. At least I'll have close to 40 years of novelisations and original fiction to enjoy. I really don't think people understand what's happening. These books are LOST. They'll be around for a few years, and then the software will be upgraded or their hard drives will crash, or their e-readers will get dropped in the toilet. Game over. And has anyone noticed the price? They might as well put out print editions. I'm not paying that money for something I don't actually own. (Do research - no one actually owns e-books). And how do we know they won't be restricted the same way those useless videogames were.
Like, DRM'd eBooks? Yeah, wouldn't put it past 'em. I think the decision is currently limited to BBC Childrens books, which is a crying-out-loud shame 'cause Penguin should be treating kids books even more sacredly than their adult titles. Nothing more than cost-cutting measures I feel, pushing Children's books that may not perform well off the shelves and into the realm of cyberspace.
Re: Nabu San
While DRMs are definitely a concern, I was referring more to the geographical restrictions that BBC's website puts on much of its Doctor Who content so it can't be downloaded or viewed by non-UK IP addresses. Virtually all of the video material, as well as things like the Amy's History Hunt game (well you can partially play it but you can't see the videos, so what's the point?). I believe the SJA website is much the same. And when they came out with those Adventure Games people outside the UK had to wait months until a commercial company began selling them - and even then, the Mac OS version of the game was not made available. Anything that can be downloaded for a fee can be restricted, so there's nothing stopping Penguin from stopping someone in Canada or the US downloading Death of the Doctor, for example. I can only hope printed editions show up later; when Pocket Books launched the Starfleet Corps of Engineers novellas as "e-book exclusives" a decade ago, they did quite well, but even they realized they could do even better reissuing them in printed omnibuses. And funny - those are the items that have survived, whereas I hear it's a challenge to track down the early SCE books in their digital form.
I've never heard of ebooks being regionlocked before. In any case I wouldn't worry in this day an age everything gets distributed illegally sooner or later.
PS. Nabu FMA podcast ep 2, Check it.
Oh hello conflict. On the one hand I'm glad that I will get to read the two stories. On the other... whaddya mean I have to be attached to an electrical device in order to do so? I grew up reading books. Tangible things with pages that got dogeared and torn because I read it over and over again. I have bookcases filled with books I have had since I was a child and I still love to this day.
eBooks may be the way forward, technological advances, yadda, yadda, but how the hell can I curl up on my sofa or snuggle in bed with an eBook? I don't own a reader, I'm not about to buy one, so I have to lug my laptop about? I think not.
If I'm paying £5 then I want something real. I want something that I can crack the spine on, scribble notes in the margin, write a dedication inside the front cover and give it as a gift. I want to be able to sit and stare at a line that has grabbed my heart and won't let go and not have to worry about the light imprinting on my retina. I want to be able to have something that I can use in a bloody power cut! Something I can pack for trains or planes, something I can take to the beach. Something that's instantly picked up and put down without having to do any booting to begin with.
And these are aimed at children? May I just weep now. It's hard enough to get kids to pick up a BOOK (you remember those things, right Penguin?) and read, tear them away from computers and gadgets and give them something else to do. eBooks are just another way of chaining kids to technology and showing them that you really can do everything on a computer.
There's a part of me that's not sure if I will buy them or not. And if I do then the temptation to print them out (I'll find a way to do it if it's not immediately doable) will be high.
"eBooks are not meant to replace paper books."
Offer it as an option, Penguin. See if there's a market for it. Compare sales of the eBooks alongside those of the physical copies and see if it's an avenue worth exploring. Don't force us to do it.
"Offer it as an option, Penguin. See if there's a market for it. Compare sales of the eBooks alongside those of the physical copies and see if it's an avenue worth exploring. Don't force us to do it."
The problem is that there's no market for these books in good old paper. That's why they were cancelled. However with the books already being written, it'd have been a waste not to publish them at all. At least this way people can still read them and they can still make some money without the expense of actually printing and distributing the book which is was made it unprofitable in the first place. Long story short just be glad it's getting published at all.
"Long story short just be glad it's getting published at all."
Um, how do they know there's not a market for it? Are they just basing this on pre-sales? Not everyone pre-orders off t'interweb because not everyone likes that. I spent ages trying to track down one of the books because it was out of print at Penguin and stupidly high prices due to the remaining stocks being in demand. So don't tell me there's not a market for it.
Unless Penguin release sales figures how do we know it was unprofitable? It's a pretty logical assumption but it's not the only one. In this current climate it's logical to want a higher return and lower costs - it could just be a way of cutting original outlay rather than anything else.
And if they'd polled me then I'd have expressed the same opinions I did in my post. I don't like eBooks, I don't like the whole premise of eBooks, and I am wondering if I'm going to buy them or not. My stupid OCD won't let me have an incomplete collection of books, but at the same time I don't like the idea of them. Why should I be grateful that they're being published in a manner that I think is awful and soulless? Even if I love and/or want the publication in question?
I'm not surprised that the books have ended up like this. I don't understand the whole novelization thing at all, why don't they publish new stories instead of ones we've already seen on TV? Surely those would sell much better.
Nov 4 has come and I can't actually find any place online to order these books - not on the Penguin site, certainly. Not that I plan to reverse my opposition to the e-book plan but I'm curious to see if they've bothered releasing them at all. Google only lists outdated blog entries for the print versions.
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