Special Kindle Illustrated, Commented Editions - Complete Works Collections - UPDATE

THE COMPLETE WORKS COLLECTION

  These are sets published this year, and I hear more attention is given to formatting with the newer ones.

  While I have the Complete Works of Shakespeare already, I wanted some of the features mentioned in the product detail.  Using the Shakespeare set as an example, the description is: "The Complete Plays of Shakespeare  (Special Kindle Illustrated and Commented Edition)  All of William Shakespeare's Unabridged Plays AND Yale Critical..."

  The set was "especially created for the Kindle" and is  "commented and fully illustrated," with:

' - Over 12 full color (color enabled device required) illustrations and photographs  [Well, THAT makes no sense, does it.  But the Kindle can deal with color photographs; it just shows them in black and white.  However, your Kindle for PC or for Mac and other Kindle apps can show them in full color] ...
- Over 300 pages of additional biographical and historical materials
- Over 14 critical essays from leading Shakespeare scholars from Yale University on various aspects of Shakespeare's life and literary legacy
- Fully Kindle enabled with fully interactive table of contents, Kindle MasterLink technology, Kindle Text-to-Speech ' (Audiobook) enabled, Kindle Lending Technology enabled

Note that sets of complete works, with illustrations, will be several times larger than a regular Kindle book.  In this case the file for the Kindle book is 6 times larger than the average Kindle book.

Here's the page listing all the Collections available.

These sets are probably, at $2.99 each or less, something students and families might find worth a look.

UPDATE - I perused my copy more closely. The illustrations I've seen so far have been in in the front and are small although putting your cursor on them and clicking on one zooms it to fill the screen but they're not in high resolution.

  There is also no explanation for these illustrations.   It's as if they're there just for atmosphere.  I don't see why they couldn't explain one was the Globe Theater.  For a set with a very good set of notes in the BACK of the book, the lack of information for the illustrations is pure laziness.

The Table of Contents: As promised, it's interactive, but the essays under "A critical Introduction to Shakespeare" by writers from Yale University, while linked under most circumstances, doesn't work if the would-be link winds up at the top of the page in some font-settings.  The workaround is to lower or raise the font size so it moves off the first line and then you can click on it.

  The essays start at Location 82864. (Good to bookmark it.)  Curiously, just in front of it is another illustration and this one is explained.  And there are others illustrations in the Yales essays section.

Chapters (to give you an idea of whether or not they'll interest you)
1.   An Outline of Shakespeare's Life
2.   English Drama before Shakespeare
3.   The Elizabethan Theater
4.   Elizabethan London
5.   Shakespeare's Nondramatic Works
6.   The Sequence of Shakespeare's plays
7.   Shakespeare's Development as a Dramatist
8.   The Chief Sources of Shakespeare's Plays
9.   How Shakespeare got into print
10. The Plays of the First Period -
      Imitation and Experiment 1587 (?)-1594
11. The Plays of the Second Period - Comedy and History
12. The Plays of the Third Period - Tragedy
13. The Plays of the Fourth Period - Romantic Tragi-Comedy
14. Chapter 14 - Famous Mistakes and Delusions about Shakespeare

Although the Complete WORKS by Shakespeare, via Mobile Reference does not have the voluminous notes/essays, its formatting is easier to read, as they use bold facing and more separation between lines.  They do recommend font size 2 to avoid odd line breaks but you can rotate the Kindle to Landscape to avoid that.  That set is $2.99 also and is nicely organized but has only a short biography of Shakespeare as an addition.  The sonnets and other poems are included in that set though.

  THIS set of plays uses small italics instead of bold facing (to identify the speaker) and less separation of lines.


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   K3 Special, $114   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
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