Sure, and the thrill of the hunt, throughout the early 80s, searching for Bantam and Ballantine Trek materials, involved some memories I still hold in fond regard. But I'm also happy to send my ongoing contributions to current and future author royalties with the new books.
I do miss the days of numbered Trek books, more for nostalgia than anything else, really. But, I think given the way that Treklit has evolved over about the past 10 to 12 years or so, I am glad they did away with the numbering. It would be rather confusing for new readers, I believe. I do still wish they published the list of previously-published novels in the books, though. Even though it would take up more pages than it's probably worth.
This is what I miss also but, the easy solution there is you can probably find that list online someplace. I haven't looked, but I'm sure it's out there somewhere. As for the numbering of the books, I too miss it for nostalgic reasons (I will go to my grave believing that there is no good reason for any kind of change for ANYTHING), but i can see the arguments behind getting rid of it, and , as long as there's a list of the books, I guess we can do without it.
If that includes such things as your clothes, your toothbrush, your tires, and your brake pads, then expect to go to your grave sooner rather than later...
I'm sure you've changed your avatar. The booklist is online in numerous places, eg: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Novels http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Novel http://www.well.com/user/sjroby/lcars/index.html
Oh, I'm aware the list is available online in multiple places, and I have frequently referred to it in the past. I just miss having it in the books, guess it's just a quirk of mine.
Yep. If you're rereading an old first printing, the booklist will be hugely out of date. If you're rereading a reprint, the booklist will be current to the date of the reprint, so potentially confusing.
^Clothes and toothbrush still apply. Not to mention bedsheets, furnace filters, razor blades, batteries in various items, etc.
Personally, I've always thought numbering novels was kind of dumb. Not just with ST, but with the first 10 B5 novels as well. To me, numbering only makes sense with a series of collections: Blish's Star Trek through Star Trek 12; ADF's Star Trek Log One through Log Ten; Star Trek: The New Voyages and Star Trek: The New Voyages 2; Strange New Worlds through Strange New Worlds 10, and so forth. The only situations I can think of where numbering novels made any sense at all was with Baum's original 14 Oz books, because they did have continuity, and the various Stratemeyer children's novel series (The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, &c.) (Which is to say that I have every Bobbsey Twins novel that appeared in the "purple" edition from the 1960s and 1970s, and I have earlier editions of the volumes that didn't make it into that edition, and of a few that were significantly rewritten for that edition, and of the two ["Baby May" and "Cherry Corners"] that were replaced with entirely new novels for that edition). Incidentally, if I remember right, my copy of Della Van Hise's infamous ST novel, Killing Time, is from the rare, uncensored, first edition. FWIW.
If the books are standalone, then yeah numbering might be unnecessary but for ongoing series like Harry Potter, where the events of the books all build off of each other, it is nice to have a quick and easy way to know which order they go in. I know you can find the information on the internet, but it's still nice to be able to look at the cover and know instantly which order they go in.
In a pinch, you can look at the copyright dates, but that only works if the books are being written and published in chronological order. And, yeah, with a continuing series, it can be a struggle to figure out what order to read them if the covers don't make that clear. Sale-wise, however, it can argued that numbering books discourages new readers from picking up the latest book. A blurb identifying a novel as "Book Five in the Florida Cat Detectives Series" pretty much tells potential buyers not to bother unless they've already read Books 1-4. Which is fine if Book One was a monster bestseller, but if you're still trying to build the series . . .
With the quantity of Star Trek books out there now, I would think that the numbers would make it easier for people to keep track of which ones they were missing, if they were interested in backfilling. I remember when I was trying to find all the Bantam novels, I had kinda wished they were numbered. And there's only about a dozen or so of them...
I don't find it that "rare" of a book. Whenever I see "A killing Time" in used bookstores, it tends to 50/50 that its the original or a reprint.
Yes and no, Go back far enough to when Titan was releasing the books in the UK, they had a different numbering to the US versions of the books and when S&S took over in the UK, the numbers jumped in the UK. So there were 8 or so were numbered in the US but not the UK as they were released as Giant Novels (if memory serves)
It was much worse when there were no Trek reference books with official/complete lists. I once spent a Saturday morning at the State Library going through every volume of "Books In Print" - from the 1965 volume through to the 1982 volume - to satisfy myself that I had everything.
Yep. Titan kicked off their monthly releases with "Chain of Attack" (#1 in UK) but Pocket was only doing new novels "every other month" so, in the UK, every second release was a title from the Pocket backlist. It lead to a few weird problems, such as a JM Dillard original character dying in one novel ("Bloodthirst") but popping up alive in a subsequent title ("Mindshadow"). The first three TOS MMPB "giant novels" in the UK were exactly as they were in the US - unnumbered - but, due to their positive UK sales performance, some older Pocket titles with a sufficiently long-enough page count, such as "Uhura's Song", "Shadow Lord", "Dwellers in the Crucible" and "Pawns and Symbols", came out in UK as extra giant novels.