Abrams and his creative team just don't want to be 'limited' by or have to contradict detailed information in such a book in the next film.
But that's never stopped anyone before. Hell, the shows contradicted Okuda's Encyclopedia and Chronology all the time, and that reference work was supposed to help keep things cohesive.
Anyway, I skimmed through the book today at B&N. Here's my thoughts.
1. Although I'm not familiar with Haynes automotive repair manuals, I am familiar with other types of manuals like that. And they are usually huge. I'm talking three or four inches of paper huge. When I saw the width of the manual here, needless to say it was nowhere near what I expected.
2. I also didn't expect it to be a hardback book, although that's not really a point against it...it's just that hardback books tend to be more expensive than paperbacks.
3. High-glossy paper! Not newsprint-style paper like all those auto repair manuals usually are. If the book was 800 pages instead of 160, then I'd have been mondo impressed.
4. Not a whole lot of text, and the text there is seems to come from either past publications or straight from the novels (i.e. the history of the Ent-B taken from "Serpents Among the Ruins") So does that mean that anything lifted from a novel is now official because it's in an official publication, i.e. the TNG Tech Manual or the Encyclopedia? Or is this book not
really an official reference work?
5. I do like the CGI renders of all the ships, although as ST-One said, the Ent-C and Ent-D look a bit off to me. But I wouldn't say they were horrendously bad or out of proportion. It's no different than the subtle differences between the physical Nebula class model and the CGI one.
6. I doubt I'll buy it, unless I buy it at Amazon for 40% less. I KNOW I won't buy it at B&N. But the ironic thing is, if it were 800 pages and cost more money, but also had 800 pages of really interesting, useful material that I had never seen or read about before, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
