Publishing Lite

[pegkerr]

Saw this in the news today:

To howls of indignation from literary purists, a leading publishing house is slimming down some of the world’s greatest novels.

Tolstoy, Dickens and Thackeray would not have agreed with the view that 40 per cent of Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and Vanity Fair are mere "padding," but Orion Books believes that modern readers will welcome the shorter versions.

The first six Compact Editions, billed as great reads "in half the time," will go on sale next month, with plans for 50 to 100 more to follow.

Malcolm Edwards, publisher of Orion Group, said that the idea had developed from a game of "humiliation," in which office staff confessed to the most embarrassing gaps in their reading. He admitted that he had never read Middlemarch and had tried but failed to get through Moby Dick several times, while a colleague owned up to skipping Vanity Fair.

What was more, he said: "We realised that life is too short to read all the books you want to and we never were going to read these ones."

Research confirmed that "many regular readers think of the classics as long, slow and, to be frank, boring. You’re not supposed to say this but I think that one of the reasons Jane Austen always does so well in reader polls is that her books aren’t that long." [emphasis added]. [Good god, if that's their attitude, then I hope this publishing concern fails miserably]

The first six titles in the Compact Editions series, all priced at £6.99, are Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Moby Dick and Wives and Daughters.

Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo, North and South and The Portrait of a Lady will follow in September.

Each has been whittled down to about 400 pages by cutting 30 to 40 per cent of the text. Words, sentences, paragraphs and, in a few cases, chapters have been removed.

Matthew Crockatt, of the London independent bookshop Crockatt & Powell, poured scorn on the enterprise. "It’s completely ridiculous — a daft idea," he said.

"How can you edit the classics? I’m afraid reading some of these books is hard work, which is why you have to develop as a reader. If people don’t have time to read Anna Karenina, then fine. But don’t read a shortened version and kid yourself it’s the real thing."

A rival classics publisher, quoted in The Bookseller magazine, accused Orion of dumbing down. "It’s patronising to consumers. One of the striking things about a huge number of the classics is how readable and approachable they are. Just making them shorter doesn’t make them more palatable."

Readers should be trusted to self-edit by skimming passages: "Aren’t readers intelligent enough to do that?" Read more

I won't be buying any, needless to say. I don't want to read a gutted version of a classic book. Yes, there are some books on this list I've struggled to get through--I did abandon Mill on the Floss, although I did finish and enjoy Middlemarch, but I like much better using the Daily Lit approach. The book seems too big and overwhelming? Then just read a little bit each day via e-mail. That is how I am now reading Moby Dick and Bleak House.

Comments

[morganmuffle]

I really dislike it when they shorten books like that, it very rarely works in encouraging people to read them and often the books end up either unreadable or they lose some of their charm.

It took me forever to get through Anna Karenina, flicking back to check names and family connections every half a page, but I enjoyed it and I'd hate to think exactly which bits they'd cut (on the otherhand by halfway through War & Peace I was skipping all the war bits so perhaps it isn't such a stupid idea *g*)

[folk.livejournal.com]

You know, I'm a total bookie (like a foodie, but with books), but I immediately thought "ooh, Tolstoy could do with this". I mean, Karenina is all RUSSIA GOOD EUROPE BAD and along the way some chick throws herself under a train. I feel that to learn this I did not need to read 59245974592458 pages of turgidly uninteresting Russian prose.

[morganmuffle]

After I posted that comment and read some of the others it occured to me that my kneejerk reaction probably had more to do with the awfully selfish "if i had to wade my way through the whole thing then why should you get out of it" reaction which probably isn't the most helpful one in the world.

That and a rabid hatred of badly cut books *doesn't metion the Chalet School paperbacks*

Still I read some of the classics in child-friendly versions when I was younger and I suppose this is along similar lines but somewhere inside I still feel it's a cop-out...

[folk.livejournal.com]

Heh, quite. And I certainly agree that badly cut books are worse than part-skimming the originals. But done well — whether in dead tree form, on the interbigweb supernetworld, or on film — I'm very fond of editing wordy literature.

...thinking about it, I wonder if there's an online-edited version of LOTR, to take out some of what I end up referring to as "In This Section, Tolkien Brags About His Mad World Creating Skillz OR Some Odd Language He Made Up".

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

I can almost see shortening Anna Karenina - in the end I liked it, but the profusion of subplots does get a little tedious - but I'm bewildered that you'd do it by cutting individual sentences and paragraphs, rather than, say, chopping out all the Mary Stu Levin sections, which would leave it both 30% shorter and arguably better, although you wouldn't learn quite so much about hunting and the predisposition of Russian serfs to serfdom.

(Mind you I actually like Tolstoy's prose and think it's quite skippy.)

[naomikritzer]

How is this startling enough to elicit actual howls from the purists? Between Cliff Notes and Reader's Digest Condensed Versions, and their predecessors, slimmed-down versions have been available practically since the invention of the novel. I read much-shortened-for-kids versions of all sorts of great classics as a seven-year-old, including Oliver Twist and the Three Musketeers.

I doubt they'll sell all that well.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Didn't Reader's Digest already think of this ?

I hope it fails miserably, because it's a terrible thing to do. I'm not sure I get how anyone can be bored with Moby Dick though. It's just like Cryptonomicon with whales instead of codes.

[naomikritzer]

Also, I loved the shortened versions as a kid. It inspired me to read the full versions of some of my favorites, and knowing the structure from reading the abridged version made it easier for me to follow the real version when I sat down with it.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The first time I came across an unabridged text of The Count of Monte Cristo I remember being very surprised by the shift to Albert Morcerf POV, which section had been stripped down to basically nothing in the abridgement I read before.

[katakanadian.livejournal.com]

I agree. I think there is a place for abridged versions which is why they have been around for decades. This is nothing new.

Movie versions of books are a more extreme abridgement yet they also serve as a gateway to great literature. I bet millions more people have read the Lord of the Rings now because of those movies. I know I did.

After watching Kenneth Branaugh's Henry V I read the original play and read Henry IV (which is about 5x as big). Later I watched Olivier's widely praised Henry V which I thought was appallingly bad because it chopped out so much (it was an hour shorter than Branaugh's).

[darth-kittius.livejournal.com]

I agree. Even as a bookie there are some books I just won't attempt right now because I don't have the time for them. That doesn't mean I don't want to be aware of the story. While I do hope that most people who read them realize they're abridged and go back to read the whole book at some point, there are many points in life when the abridged can be useful.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

Hasn't the publishing industry been doing this for decades? I remember how surprised I was when my wife cheerfully exclaimed about the fact that I owned the unabridged version of Little Women, adding that it was difficult to find the unabridged version, particularly in paperback.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

The first time I read Pride and Prejudice, at 18 or so, I just couldn't get through it. The next time, in my mid-20s, I read an abridged version (not on purpose, it was just there) and fell in love with it and with Austen, and all subsequent readings of her work have been in the full-length versions. I don't know if I was just ready for the work that time, or if the abridged version really made a different.

OTOH, I was outraged when (age 11 or so) I ordered a paperback version of Little Women from Scholastic, because the edition I'd inherited was literally falling apart, and found the entire play scene was missing as well as individual lines all over the pace. I knew the book well enough by then to miss them.

I don't think I mind abridged versions unless I know what I'm missing. And then there's the most brilliant "abridgement" of all, "The Princess Bride".

[katakanadian.livejournal.com]

Loved the Princess Bride (movie and book)!

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised by some of their choices. Wives and Daughters and Vanity Fair are both entertaining and easy reads - they don't have a lot of complicated sentence structure or lengthy description. They're both books that I read on my Palm Pilot, in snatched moments of free time on the bus or between clients. The barriers to reading them just don't seem that high.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Both the Gaskell books on the list are fast reads, and I can't imagine wanting to cut them -- Moby Dick or The Count of Monte Cristo sure, but Wives and Daughters?

Morons.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Oh you are KIDDING ME.

BAH.

[phoenixsong]

Haven't abridged versions been around for years?

I have to confess, I own two copies of The Count of Monte Cristo. One is the abridged copy (the only version I could find at the time) I purchased in 8th grade and fell in love with. I've read it multiple times, enough that I was outraged by the recent movie changing the basic premise of the main characters' relationship. The other is the unabridged, which I stumbled across a few years ago. I tried to read it, and perhaps got half-way through, but I just couldn't finish it -- and I'm no slouch for reading difficult material. I still have it, though, and perhaps at some point I'll try again.

[dreamflower]

I read the unabridged version from the library in fifth grade, and I adored it. In fact, I love most of Dumas' books. But it's all in what you learn to love and read at a young age. I won't read any version of Robin Hood except for Howard Pyle's.

[castiron.livejournal.com]

I don't know which parts they left out in the abridged version, but one thing I love about the unabridged is that almost all the apparently unimportant incidents and characters turn out to be relevant later. That'd be the main reason I'd recommend trying it again at some point if you're so inclined; it's a heckuva lot of threads to keep in your head, but Dumas actually ties them all off by the end.

(It's my favorite airplane book -- long enough that I won't finish it before the first leg of the flight's over, and interesting enough that on one flight out of O'Hare, I looked up and thought "hm, shouldn't we have taken off by now?" and then checked my watch and discovered that we'd been stuck on the tarmac for 45 minutes.)

[phoenixsong]

I think I got bogged down in the hash-pipe section -- at which point I thought "wow, no wonder this was cut in the abridged version!" I remember it seeming to last forever, but I don't know how accurate that perception is s:)

Mind you, by the time I picked up the unabridged, I'd started to be able to pick up where a number of cuts must have been made. I really should give it another try, except other stuff keeps getting my attention first. *g*

[dreamflower]

Nothing new; Reader's Digest and various children's publishers have done the same thing for decades.

They will find the same sorts of buyers, too--usually a well-meaning relative who buys the book as a gift for a book-loving grandchild or neice or nephew. Who will promptly put it on the shelf and check the full version out from the library (if they have not already read it.)

(As I recall from many of my own Christmases and birthdays.)

On the other hand, they might make nice reading in the waiting rooms at the doctor's office, instead of ten year old People Magazines...

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

If there's a book that I have trouble getting through, I find that if I can find a well-performed audiobook and listen to it on my player while commuting, I'll get through it just fine and enjoy it.
I don't really see the point of reading a shortened version of a classic. I assume that if it's a GOOD book (which I assume these all are) then the author was not a hack or being paid by the word, and those words are there for a purpose.

They're cutting SOMETHING out. Whatever they're cutting out may be stuff that the editors didn't find important, but it may be the very thing that makes that book meaningful TO YOU. I'm not here and breathing in order to see the world through someone else's filter. OK, in the case of books I'm seeing it through the author's filter, but I don't need two filters.

Honestly, I do appreciate reading notes on books, because honestly I'm not good at recognizing historical tie-ins, sub-plots, and innuendo. But those are probably the very thing they're ripping out here.

Ever hear "10 classics in 10 minutes?" It's a howl.

[folk.livejournal.com]

I assume that if it's a GOOD book (which I assume these all are) then the author was not a hack or being paid by the word, and those words are there for a purpose.

Many of the "classics" were, in fact, written by authors paid by the word! Dickens springs to mind as the most egregiously needlessly verbose author of my experience. Many of his works in book form are also hand-numbingly long because they were originally published in weekly or monthly periodicals, so he has to include a lot of "previously, on Star Trek: Great Expectations..." that I associate primarily with the middle books of fantasy trilogies:

"Princess Mirabellaprettysparkleflowerieaieiaieie, the most beautiful princess in all of Kayeeaieielaieia, moped in her pink bedroom. 'Oh, Maid Plainandfrumpy, my dearest and most faithful servant, I do not wish to marry the nasty and generally horrid Prince Handsomeyetcruel! Why, his treatment of me in the previous novel, which you, the reader, must indubitably have read, was simply ghastly!'"

In general, I also find that the Classics are (a) simplistic in plot and moral (not morals!), and (b) the best horses in a much smaller field. This is why I'm terribly fond of modern "period" literature (sort of the book equivalent of Merchant Ivory films) — the atmosphere is all there*, and yet the characters don't irritate the pants off me.

*I do realise that the atmosphere is primarily derived from the Classic works in the period. Nonetheless, I'm glad that the author is the one who had to read them, and not I!

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

It's a bit dismaying to me to see Malcolm Edwards's name attached to this. He was a science fiction fan, a good fanzine publisher in the 1970s. He ran a good science fiction line at Gollancz in the 1980s, too. He's long since become a publishing mogul; I guess this kind of thing comes with that territory.

[pinkfinity.livejournal.com]

Hermione says, "Meh!"

Actually, I read "Orion Group" above as "Onion Group", and this wouldn't surprise me coming from The Onion. Or the companies that turn classics into comic books for second graders.

Otherwise? Meh.

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

(Thanks for the Daily Lit link. I have signed up.)

[ckd]

I like Keith Olbermann's abridged version of Moby Dick.

"Call me Ishmael. This whale sank my boat. The End."

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Ulysses: "Man walks around Dublin for a day."

[whiskeychick.livejournal.com]

What a great way to get in reading everyday. Soon as I finish commenting (my new guilty pleasure), I'm going to sign up, too.

My knee jerk reaction is much the same as yours; however, as long as it's clearly labeled as an abridged version, that's on the reader than. What it will do, I think, in literary circles is create a hierarchy of readers.

I imagine:

Did you read the full version of War and Peace?

No, the abridged.

You really were cheated, you must read the classic version or you're just cheating yourself...

later at the same party...

Did you know so and so hasn't read the REAL version of War and Peace...

blah blah.

okay, i'm in creating mode, can you tell. time to get off LJ and get to writing.

[bohemianspirit.livejournal.com]

Gack. If I were to find myself at a party like that, I'd be cutting out of there ASAP in search of a friendlier, less pretentious crowd. :-) Read to enjoy, not to impress!

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I can't speak for most of the others, but The Count of Monte Cristo could certainly benefit by losing the chapters that were nothing but history lessons on the Napoleanic wars.

On the other hand, I'd prefer to hand readers the complete version and let them skip such parts as they choose to skip. You never know, some of them might be history buffs.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Reader's Digest has condensed both classics and modern books for years, so there's obviously some market. All this hoopla is probably because no one expects any better of Reader's Digest, but they do of mainstream publishers. But mainstream publishers have been abridging books for centuries; just not much recently, so it seems like backsliding.

[elfundeb.livejournal.com]

After giving up on Vanity Fair after two chapters, I have to say that the prospect of an abridged version does not tempt me in the slightest. I'm fulfilled without it, and many other tried and tossed volumes. Nor do I believe I would have liked Anna Karenina better in an abridged version, especially since they probably would have cut my favorite bits. I bet they cut Middlemarch by excising entire subplots.

I still have very fond memories of reading Robinson Crusoe for Children. It was probably printed back in the 1930s. However, I confess that I've never read the original work. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Many of our cultural references derive from literature, and my children's version provided all the cultural reference points I needed.

[fireriven.livejournal.com]

Holy crap. Horrifying visions of Fahrenheit 451 are dancing through my head.

My most hated internet initialism is 'TL;DR'.

[vass]

What's newsworthy about this? Abridgement's so commonplace that I first started reading the colophon just to make sure I was getting the whole book.

It makes me want to go on a binge of very long Victorian novels.

Hmm. *looks at bookshelf* It's been a while since I read Trollope, and I still haven't finished The Last Chronicle of Barset. Plus there's Vanity Fair I've yet to start, and I skimmed 'Our Mutual Friend' and want to go back and give it a more thorough read. And I started War and Peace a while ago, and should go back to it, because I was liking it better than Anna Karenina (too much pre-Freudian analysis.)

Yeah, a very long book is a commitment. But is that a bad thing? You invest a bunch of time and effort into it, and then you get a big payoff. You get to live with the characters for a while. It's an immersion. And a marathon. And you get a sense of achievement for sticking with it, as well as the usual pleasures of reading a good book.

Re Daily Lit: pepysdiary goes over particularly well that way, because it has natural stopping and starting points. I'm reading it an entry a day over nearly ten years, just like he wrote it.