Matthew Richardson

Looking into the well-read future

E-books can be a strange, parochial beast. As any Kindle-user will know, the content of the Kindle store often varies wildly in terms of design and reading experience. Classics suffer especially from this. A lot of out-of-copyright classics have been digitized by volunteers and are available free, but devoid of any notes, substantial chapter headings and basic page formatting. Even worse, output from some of the big publishing houses proves little better. Pages are inadequately formatted, the type isn’t adjustable; and infuriating gaps exist between paragraphs, while the font often renders sentences unintelligible.

But there are some saints among the throng of sinners. Scouting around for my fill of Dickens recently on the Kindle store, I stumbled across Delphi Classics, an e-book only outfit that specializes in public domain content. A sample confirmed that the design was immaculate, the paragraph breaks cleanly formatted and a nice selection of illustrations to accompany the tales — the reading experience box ticked, then. But that’s the least of it.

Having bought the e-book — a bargain at £2.14 — the full range of the contents page unfurled itself. Bookshops burst at the moment with numerous editions of Great Expectations and Bleak House. But when was the last time you saw an edition of ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’, Dickens’s first published short story? We are all familiar with A Christmas Carol, but I hadn’t appreciated the full extent of Dickens’s Christmas writing. Here, under a section entitled ‘The Christmas Novellas’ lurked: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain — and that’s not to mention the eleven ‘Christmas Short Stories’. There is even a ‘Collaborative Works’ section and ‘The Plays’, and then we are on to the ‘Non-Fiction’, including The Complete Speeches and The Complete Letters.

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