(no subject)

[opusculasedfera]

No disappointment like discovering a new volume by an author you admire and then realising it's actually just a bizarre reorganisation of some of their previous work. I know why the publishers do this, but why on earth do libraries fall for it? I'm not even talking about publishing selections from an author's massive, hundreds of pages long corpus, which is perfectly logical, but making selections from two already quite short volumes, or even publishing something as selections from a single volume, which was already only about 200 pages long and has now been cut to the much more reasonable...150 pages. Don't the libraries have something better to spend their (as they keep reminding us) extremely limited budgets on, when they already own copies of every single word in this new volume, in formats that are no less convenient for even the average reader? Or at least hint in the description that it is, in fact, selections from this other book, so we don't waste your money ferrying the volume between libraries for me to find that out for myself.

Comments

[everbright]

That is HORRENDOUS. Ugh, I dislike cut-up things anyway, but then accidentally taking it home with out knowing would be very annoying.

[opusculasedfera]

It's perfectly ridiculous that publishers can create these volumes without having to label them somewhere as containing work taken from the previous volume!

I do agree, there are so few books that are really improved by being chopped up. Essays aren't so awful, but that doesn't mean people don't try with novel chapters, which virtually never works.