Bring long fantasy epics back to life

The longest fantasy series, and why we read them : Walk Into Mordor

If you are a fantasy reader then Bookmark this link! A very good list (76 and growing) of the longest fantasy series out there. If you're looking for something new to read you can browse through the list and click through to Librarything.com to get the details.

To get on the list there had to be at least 5 books or 2000 pages (way too many trilogies out there). Pages counts come from Amazon you are pretty well assured that there are retail copies of all books out there.

The discussion of why we like to read a long series of books with the same characters and setting is fairly straightforward. What occurred to me was the utter stupidity of the publishers who have failed to move mountains to get some authors' back-catalogs into e-books as soon as possible, if only to fill in voids in some of these series.

Charles Stross posted an answer to a fan's concern about not finding book four of a six book series. He went through the whole 'and this is how sausage is made' process of why there was no e-book and concluded:

PSA: Where is the ebook edition of "The Merchants War"? - Charlie's Diary: "Anyway, Tor have my written permission to roll out 'The Merchants War' as an ebook whenever they want, and I've expressed my feelings quite clearly (about the unwisdom of making all but one middle volume of a series available through a given retail channel), and my editor Feels My Pain: but I'm not holding my breath in anticipation. If in the meantime you want to download a dodgy scan of that particular book (and buy a mass market paperback for the conscience money), I personally won't hold it against you."

A number of fantasy authors (CJ Cherryh for one) have bought/are buying out their back catalog and self-publishing:

Closed Circle: "We’re rescuing our kids as fast as we can get the rights back, scan and edit them for all the typos put in by New York, and give them a new look. ...
We’re also rewriting a lot of these books. Why? Well, for one thing, we learned a lot on the way, both about writing and the characters, and this is a chance to let the work reflect that. For another, in many cases, the books never reached their full potential because they were written for a market where length was a primary concern…or they were trimmed due to marketing ‘category’ limitations."

I'd like to see all of these epic fantasy series as e-books and, if the author is interested, have the earlier books in a series repaired and reworked of necessary. In the case of Tolkien, CS Lewis, and Burroughs we have everything we will ever get out of them. In the case of living and engaged authors we have an opportunity to get an even "epicer" epic series.