If you’re a fan of epic fantasy, there’s a great deal on Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series at Humble Bundle through the month of April.
You can get the full 14 book series, plus the prequel and a couple of companion novels, for a grand total of $18. That’s an incredible amount of content—over 15,000 pages in print length—that could literally take years to read through.
If you bought these same ebooks right now from Amazon or Kobo or your other ebook store of choice it would cost over $173 for all 17 books, so being able to get them for $18 is an insanely good deal.
The nice thing about this offer is the fact that the ebooks are DRM free, and they’re in EPUB format so they’ll work with just about any ereader or app without any hassles. You can send the EPUBs to your Kindle using Send to Kindle without having to use Calibre or plugins to clean up the files first, although you can use Calibre to change the hideous Prime video covers to the original covers if you want.
Personally, I’m conflicted about taking advantage of this deal. I read the first 5 or so books in The Wheel of Time series about 20 years ago, and they’re good books but I wouldn’t consider them great books. Robert Jordan excels at character development and world building, and his writing style is very visually descriptive, but the pacing is pretty slow. It got to a point where you could summarize what happened in a book in a sentence or two—like how did it take a thousand pages for them to travel from point A to point B and have two things happen along the way.
Nevertheless, it’s a very popular series and it’s worth checking out, especially at that price. Most of the books are available through Kindle Unlimited right now too, so that’s another way to read them for cheap, but at $12 a month to rent them you might as well just pay $18 for the Humble Bundle deal.
The first five or six books were Jordan’s best, afterwards the series became somewhat cumbersome. Brandon Sanderson did a great job of finishing the series after Robert Jordan’s death.
I’ve been avoiding Robert Jordan like the plague since I first saw it on B.Dalton’s shelves in the mall in 1990, and now’s not going to be different. You could pay *me* $50 to accept them — and I’d still shred the file immediately after download. DO NOT WANT.
From the Humble Bundle web site, if’n it matters to you:
> Enjoy these amazing titles and help support the
> American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) with your purchase.
Select “adjust my donation, and set ACLU to $0 and the sliders auto update for publisher and Humble companies.
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Ah rip, it’s such a good deal 🙁