Are There Any Good Abridged Books?

[Chainsaw Hobbit]

My first exposure to Terry Pratchett was an abridged recording of The Carpet People. My ten-year-old self ate it up and created crude D&D stats for the characters and creatures. Years later, I read the full version, and liked it better.

People often complain about abridged books. They are treated as a horrible butchering of the original work, and a blasphemy against the author. Though I understand the rationale, I don't think this is inherently true. There is nothing wrong with refining or adapting an existing work, so long as proper credit is given to the original creator.

Some books are not meant to be abridged. Anything with a focus on minutia, defined by its details, should probably remain uncut. But, more story driven works could probably survive a trimming in most cases.

Are there any examples of abridgment done well? Any condensed works that maintain or even transcend the greatness of the original?

[Mx.Silver]

I think most abridged versions of The Three Musketeers are regarded as fairly decent. Serialised stuff may be a place to look here? There's also The Princess Bride, although that doesn't really count for obvious reasons.
Really, abridgement in books is more something that occurs in the world of audiobooks, and its sheer ubiquity there is one of most annoying things about the genre.

I can't think of any abridged works that are regarded as being superior to the originals, and even if they are the practice just feels a bit... off. That whole process of 'refining' as you put it is something that does (or should) take place during the actual writing of the book. In fact it often takes up the majority of the time of writing the book. Books are basically the creations of the author; having other people come along and mess about with things just dilutes that.

[Mordar]

Well, one could argue that The Stand by Stephen King is a good abridgement, although that's more like a movie that comes out, does well, and then gets a Director's Cut special edition DVD...

- M

[Chainsaw Hobbit]

Some forms of media - such as films, television shows, and video games - are made by teams of people. I don't see any reason why books couldn't also have many contributors. I take no issue with a book being abridged by someone other than the author, so long as the book is respected, and it is made clear that the finished product is an abridgment.

I think some books could be better, and reach a wider audience, if abridged copies were made. Some examples ...

The King's Dark Tower series, by Stephen King.
Moby ****, by Herman Melville.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by H. P. Lovecraft.
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.


Haha. It appears the forum censor blocked part of the title of a certain whale-related classic novel.

[hamishspence]

I've seen quite a lot of "pocket book" versions of classics.

Mutiny on the Bounty, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, and so forth.

[Mx.Silver]

Some forms of media - such as films, television shows, and video games - are made by teams of people. I don't see any reason why books couldn't also have many contributors.
Those three forms of media though all have multiple levels of work, that frequently require whole teams of people to produce in the first place. Books really don't. Barring the odd collaboration, they've basically a one-person operation which is why almost all of them have a distinct authorial voice - something which most TV, Films and games do not possess. An abridged book is therefore seeing the work through a third party's lens, as it were, and it also poses a serious obstacle to attempts to analyse and/or interpret the work, because you're no longer working from the complete source material.
This is before we even get into the matter of whether or not said abridgement is actually going to be an improvement at all.



I take no issue with a book being abridged by someone other than the author, so long as the book is respected, and it is made clear that the finished product is an abridgment.

Fair enough, but assuming you were in your local library and saw two copies of a book, one declaring it was abridged and one which was not abridged, which would you be more likely to pick? Probably the unabridged one. In fact I'd venture that most people if approaching a book for the first time would pick the unabridged copy first.
Admittedly, this is likely due to psychological reasons more than anything else - learning something is abridged tends to provoke questions as to what was cut and why; the fact that it's cut may give the impression it's less value for money or somehow incomplete etc.
In any event, it should be noted that while unabridged audiobooks tend to loudly announce their status on the front, abridged ones tend to be rather less prominent in their notifications. So it does look like this is something people selling the things think is an issue.



I think some books could be better, and reach a wider audience, if abridged copies were made.
I'm not going to dispute that many works could be improved (in fact it's a very small list of fiction indeed that couldn't possible be improved in some way) reaching a wider audience is another matter.
Unless there's some serious push from academic circles getting them taught in education (and academics are unlikely to behind abridgement because of the aforementioned obstacles to analysis and interpretation) books typically only reach a wide audience if there's a a serious amount of publicity behind them and whether this happens or not is largely independent of the book's own merits. Given the aforementioned potential problems in selling abridged books advertised as such
marketing abridged books while declaring that they're abridged, I don't really see this happening. Honestly, the only real market for abridged books I could would be people who'd already read the originals and were curious about whether or not the abridged version would be an improvement, and I doubt that's much of a majority.

[Jimorian]

The Princess Bride. :smallwink:

[Themrys]

While many books could, in theory, be improved, the books that are abridged most often are classics. Which means that, while they are easier to read in the abridged version, they aren't really better than the original.

Now, something like "Twilight" could be much, much better in an abridged version, but why should anyone spend money on that? It sells good enough as it is.

People want easy to read versions of books they must read - which are classics.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Those three forms of media though all have multiple levels of work, that frequently require whole teams of people to produce in the first place. Books really don't. Barring the odd collaboration, they've basically a one-person operation which is why almost all of them have a distinct authorial voice - something which most TV, Films and games do not possess. An abridged book is therefore seeing the work through a third party's lens, as it were, and it also poses a serious obstacle to attempts to analyse and/or interpret the work, because you're no longer working from the complete source material.
This is before we even get into the matter of whether or not said abridgement is actually going to be an improvement at all.


All false. The other people just don't get listed, except in acknowledgements in the inside cover if they're lucky. And they have VAST input into basic characterization, plot, things like that. My mother works as a book editor, in recent years focusing on young adult fiction, and she has and does on a regular basis remove plot points, change the order of things happening, change characters, remove unnecessary characters...

There are just as many levels of work in a novel as in a TV show. They just don't get the credit. People think of book editing as just making sure the commas are in the right place, if they even think of it at all, but some of the manuscripts my mum receives are unrecognizably different once they've passed through all levels of the publishing industry, through several drafts, with agents, publishers, editors and writers all collaborating on creating a piece of work.


Now, what I actually meant to come in here to say, is that often older popular history texts... are impossible to get through. I have an abridged version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and I doubt I could make it even past the first 3 chapters were it not abridged, it's a hard enough read as is.

Edit: another thought: in my French class in highschool we read a heavily abridged version of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. Abridged texts can be very useful to those learning second languages!