A Kindling We Will Go

Well, that didn't take long.

Yesterday our (Janice's*) new Kindle arrived, and before the evening was over we had ebook versions of THE LORD OF THE RINGS (single volume edition, of course), THE HOBBIT, and something called THE HOBBIT: COMPLETE SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS by one Raja Sharma,** along with a smattering of other books (Kai Lung, Harry Stephen Keeler, Journey to the West), joined today by still more (the v. low price makes a strong incentive for impulse buys). I'm eagerly looking forward to the chance to add SIGURD & GUDRUN by this time next week (so I can look at it before my copy arrives from England).

I discovered that there were eleven of the books about Tolkien's work by other authors already available on Kindle, all of which I have (but not all read) on my shelves. There's a decided bias in favor of religious-themed works here, for whatever reason: Kreeft, Wood, Rutledge, Bruner, and Sarah Arthur's two little books on the one hand, vs. the more miscellaneous Chance, Timmons & Clark, Beahm, Hart & Khovacs, and Colbert on the other. I'm surprised by the absence of the big-name Tolkien scholars -- nothing by Carpenter, Flieger, Hammond & Scull, or Shippey. Also surprising is the pricing: most are inexpensive ($9.99 for most, $7.99 for the Sarah Arthurs), with the exceptions being the Chance collection ($29.84) and Timmons-Clark (which goes for a whopping $88.76).

I suspect as more of Tolkien's own work moves onto Kindle, more of the secondary work will follow. We'll see. In the meanwhile, time to practice mashing those buttons . . .

--JDR




*in our household, Janice tends to buy the bright new techie toys and then let me play with them. She's already mastered the Kindle controls, while I'm still at the 'what does this button do?' stage.

**apparently the ebook equivalent of Cliff's Notes. At a quick glance, I give him points for not repeating the common error that JRRT was "born in South Africa" but instead correctly giving his place of birth as the Orange Free State.