Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is a novel written using the English language. It was written by J.K. Rowling, who has also written several other novels.
As far as the novel goes, it has a nice cover featuring a picture of Harry Potter on a broom. It wraps-around fully and even goes onto the inside flaps. It’s rather whimsical and is one of the reasons that I bought the book. The book is a 6″ x 9″ hardcover with a glue binding. The type is very legible in 12-point Adobe Garamond. The interior art is all pencil drawn and of decent quality. I have seen better in other books, but it’s not bad. The margins are fairly large and the type is widely spaced. I did not notice any problems with proofreading.
On the contents. The inside covers are blank and navy blue in color. The first page contains the title, then there’s another page with title, author, and illustrator. The third page contains the copyright notice followed by a table of contents. There are seventeen chapters.
On page 9, the action starts. Harry Potter is a young boy who has been orphaned. This goes on for 17 pages, then we skip ahead a decade or so. Things proceed in a linear narrative from that point forward.
At the end of the book, there’s a couple pages detailing the type font and various other credits.
Overall, the novel was quite good. The format is a bit worn (young hero does heroic stuff), but there is a good mix of mystery and magic to offset this. It is supposed to be the first in a series of novels focused on Harry Potter, so the characters should see some much-needed development in the future.
I recommend this novel and await the next installment.
But is the pdf bookmarked? That’s a deal breaker for me.
Hah!
But since RPG books are handbooks, meant to be used at the table rather than just read once, I think it is actually appropriate to comment on the binding, typeface, etc. in RPG reviews, and whether or not there are indexes, ToC, etc.
Why so many reviews obsess over art and such is less understandable.
Agreed about the art – when I buy a PDF version of a book, I don’t even bother printing the pictures if I have the choice. As for fonts, I don’t really care as long as they are legible. If the binding breaks, I just hole-punch it and put it in a binder.
Having a good index is nice, although I can get by without it. Post-it notes on the outside of the pages get me to the most important parts faster than an index anyway, but it’s nice to be able to look up the obscure things in an index.
What I want to know from a review is the content.
Cover art, illustrations, and type size ARE all important factors in whether a novel is worth buying or not – particularly type size!
Speaking of Harry Potter, weren’t you going to do a Deathly Hallows review at one point?
Brilliant.
Is this in response to a L&L review or just generally bemused at how RPGs are reviewed? Hilarious in any case.
Just general bemusement. It’s actually one of the reasons I stopped writing reviews for RPGNet. There was a little fetish cult which had become obsessed with the physical properties of their RPG manuals and thought that “cost per page” or “cost per word” were the only factors that determined value.
The result was that the majority of reviews at RPGNet were being written with multiple paragraphs of irrelevant nonsense. It was a culture I had no interest in joining: Unless there is something truly exceptional (either good or bad) about the physical presentation of a book, there is absolutely no reason to mention it in your review. There’s certainly no need to wax rhapsodic about it for multiple paragraphs or make the majority of your review about it.