I was just looking over the novels of Rihannsu and I see they have an omnibus that is 768 pages. The individual books them selves (5) are over 200. So is it better to read them by themselves or not?
Wow - I cannot believe I missed these... I have no idea where you should start... But I know I will be looking into them myself. However, I did notice that they are not canon - and were rejected by Roddenberry himself unfortunately.
Never considered them either. I usually do not read TOS stuff but I have always been a huge fan of the Romulans.
I would be interested just for the fact it is Romulan oriented - unlike most Star Trek... It is always something I have been more interested in than just the Federation which is the POV of the movies/series anyway. It is a shame that the novels only cover TOS era - however I have noticed that there is a LOT of background Romulan information on Memory Alpha - which undoubtedly you have already read through. I think a Romulan specific series would be phenomenal - although not popular enough among the typical Trek base to be warranted.
IIRC, the omnibus version (Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages) tweaks some of the text to make the timeline more internally consistent, so you might be better off getting it. However, The Bloodwing Voyages was released around the same time as The Empty Chair, so unfortunately it's not included in the omnibus. So whichever way you'll go, you'll have to buy The Empty Chair as a standalone. (Although in theory, one omnibus and one standalone should be cheaper than five standalones. In just checking now, though, that's not the case at Kobo. The four standalones in the omnibus are currently C$7.99 each, whereas the omnibus is C$41.99. Seriously, it was C$16.99 a few months ago. Sometimes ebook pricing is just stupid.)
If you are new to these stories, yes, get the omnibus and the standalone "The Empty Chair". For those of us who read the first two instalments as they were published, we didn't notice the weird timeline problems as much. Duane also tried to give Chapel time to earn her MD. Early novelist assumptions were that Kirk took the Enterprise on another (five-year?) mission between TOS and TMP, and then the two later instalments attempted to tweak their timing, but that messed with the timing of other Duane books such as "The Wounded Sky" and "Spock's World".
As an aside, you can play as a Romulan Republic character through STO if you prefer a Romulan (or Reman or Romulan-affiliated alien) POV.
I actually prefer the original editions of My Enemy, My Ally and The Romulan Way, but I prefer the omnibus edition of Swordhunt.
I've been reading through the old TOS books, particularly the ones that form something of a rough continuity. As I've continued to go through them, more and more I've started gravitating towards a read-in-publication-order approach. And because I'm a slow reader, I figured what you are suggesting here, that the passage of time will make the alterations between the first two books and Swordhunt less of a jolt (although I feel fairly permissive of continuity elasticity with these books anyway). Consequently, I've chosen to go with them all as individual books, and read in something akin to their original context (rather than straight through without any other stories in between). Christopher's comment about preferring Swordhunt in the omnibus is a fun alternative to consider. I haven't ruled out getting a copy of the omnibus and reading them long after I've gone through the books in their original incarnations.