DELPHI CLASSICS - EBOOK BARGAINS

After my recent purchase of a new Kindle I was thinking about acquiring a few things that would be expensive or difficult to get in physical book form.

In particular I fancied a complete works of Shakespeare, so I browsed the Kindle store to see what was available. Among the hundreds of versions of the Bard’s oeuvre I noted one from a company called Delphi Classics. I actually ended up buying from another company just because I liked the layout better, but I made a note of Delphi as they seemed to be highly regarded and I’d heard them spoken about in terms of other works.

Publishers like Delphi specialise in providing cheap ebook versions of older literature that has entered the public domain. Organisations like Project Gutenberg offer a lot of this stuff for free - 75,000 titles, to be exact, but if you want something a bit more polished and which can be bought and downloaded directly on to your Kindle, then Delphi is the way to go.

I got to thinking about my current favourite author Wilkie Collins, who lived in the nineteenth century, meaning that all of his books are now public domain. I’ve already bought all of his novels in physical form that are offered by Oxford World Classics or Penguin, but that still leaves quite a few that are out of print except for a few dodgy looking versions on Amazon. My thinking is this : I want all his major works as real books, but I also want to be a completist and read everything, so why not get the others as ebooks? It would also save on shelf space, which is at a premium in my tiny Japanese apartment.

I checked Delphi’s website and found they had just what I was looking for - the complete novels and shorter works of Collins, to be downloaded direct to my Kindle for about $3.99, which is a good deal for twenty-four novels and more. Perfect - all those lesser-known books available at last!

Since then I’ve bought another fourteen ‘complete works’ of other Victorian authors, some of them for as little as $1. It really allows you to explore the less famous novelists in a cost-friendly manner. Some offer superb value, such as that for Margaret Oliphant, which contains more than eighty novels, only two or three of which are published in paperback by Oxford or Penguin.

The big names such as Dickens, the Brontës and Oscar Wilde are on Delphi too, as well as twentieth century writers like Tolkien, D H Lawrence and H P Lovecraft. They also have the works of many non-English writers including ancient classics : Zola, Tolstoy Dostoevsky, Homer, Plato, Aristotle and so on.

However, it is here that I must mention one of two caveats. Because we are dealing with public domain here, any foreign language works are in older translations which may be substandard or bowdlerised. For example, Delphi’s Emile Zola collection uses the Ernest Vizetelly translations, which are not only over a hundred years old, but also omit or change the more salacious passages that couldn’t be published in Victorian England.

The other small problem is typos : while the Delphi texts are beautifully presented and organised with additional biographical material and pictures, I noticed quite a few scanning errors in one of their newer titles. Nothing major, but a few missing full stops or other small mistakes. Apparently these become corrected with time, as the material from the collections which have been out longer had no such defects. For the bargain price, this is tolerable and I didn’t find anything that hindered my enjoyment of the books.

In conclusion, I highly recommend Delphi Classics for those who are fine with ebooks and want to get budget access to a large collection of English-language literature from the past couple of centuries. For their foreign-language material I would think twice, since you would be much better served by more up to date and accurate translations.