Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.
This week Billy asks: Have you ever received a bound galley from a publisher for review? What did you think about it? Were you surprised at anything?
I have received a few bound galleys to review. I even have one unbound galley print that a publisher sent me. They are pretty much books that haven't gone through the full process of editing and formatting yet, which means that you have to be a little more forgiving when you read them, and extrapolate a little bit to imagine what the final, polished product will look like. This extrapolation requirement is why I am not a huge fan of bound galleys for reviews - there just isn't a way to reliably do that, which means to a certain extent when one reviews based on a bound galley, one is reviewing in the dark a little bit.
To digress a bit, I remember when George Lucas announced that he was going to release a remastered version of the original set of Star Wars movies to add some new interstitial scenes and clean up some special effects gaffes that had been in the original prints. I recall focusing on one element in particular that had bothered me in Star Wars: When Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader are having their light saber battle, there are a couple of instances in which the coloring done on the light sabers was incompletely done and one can see the black batons that they were actually holding for fight sequence. My first thought was that this would certainly be fixed in the remastered version of the movie. After all, it was a fairly obvious technical error, and something that pretty obviously should have been fixed. And then when the fixed up version came out, this had not been addressed at all. I was so very disappointed.
And this is what seems to happen when one tries to project what changed will be made to a galley when it is transformed into a finished product. The issues that you, the reader, had thought were ones that were most glaringly obvious are not the same ones that the author and publisher saw. And things that you figured were fine were things that they thought needed to be altered.
Previous Book Blogger Hop: Trajan Became Roman Emperor in 98 A.D.
Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: "The 100" Is a Post-Apocalyptic Novel by Kass Morgan That Was Made into a Television Series
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