Kickstarter sees a range of projects, from established companies looking to fund specific projects to start-ups seeking their first big break. A fresh campaign from a book publisher falls into the former category, with a company looking to take its French business international.
Third Editions Books is a publisher founded in 2015 by Nicolas Courcier and Mehdi El Kanafi, with a focus on books about games. The duo have their names credited on a range of publications, and under the Third Editions Books label have published three premium hardcover texts in French - one focused on Final Fantasy VII, one called Dark Souls: Beyond Death, and another called Zelda: Archive of a Legendary Saga. These are the texts they want to translate professionally into English, with the US market a particular target. The pitch video is below.
At the time of writing the fundraising campaign has raised around €20,000 of its €100,000 goal, though it's still early and it has 28 days left to run.
Do you like the look of this project and these books?
[source kickstarter.com]
Comments 18
Shhh, can you hear that? That is a Cease and Desist crossing the sound barrier.
If they were official books being translated into English, then I would be interested... but I'm not interested in unofficial third party publications.
Very professional, but I'm not interested. I'll stick to the Hyrule Historia and the Zelda art book when it comes out.
Just wait until Nintendo takes this down...
Meh, not feeling it I'm sorry to say. Oh well.
@Piersen I find that unlikely as they're all published books already, though never rule anything out I suppose!
@ThomasBW84 Also this is not the first time print media has existed for a further analysis of particular series without issues. For example "Final Fantasy and Philosophy: The Ultimate Walkthrough" was released back in 2009 and published by John Wiley & Sons. By the way excellent read if you are a fan of the series.
Will back next payday. I really want all three of the books and really excited to check it out. May double dip and grab the French edition as well. Merci beaucoup Nicolas Courcier et Mehdi El Kanafi!
Still waiting on my N64 anthology book to get here next month, but I may want to help this project too. Seems a better deal than funding video games on KS, IMO.
Books? What are those?
@ThomasBW84 Sure, I hope. I just have trouble trusting Nintendo with not attacking its own fans, since they're capable of claiming and monetizing entire podcasts/reviews for showing their publicly available trailers for a fraction of the running time, taking down fan games, etc.
@Piersen Since the books don't use any images, artwork, extracts or anything copyrighted, a cease and desist can't be issued. The whole is plain text, just giving info about the series and some insight.
Another French publisher called Pix'N'Love does use pictures and such for some books but has a partnership with the concerned parties (namely Sega and Nintendo for Metroid's 30th). If you can read french, go to their website and see their little explantation about how they can publish their books without worry, even without a partnership. It's interesting.
Having read those books (I'm French), I can highly recommend them. They are very well written.
@Kosmo the books have some artwork in them, but the video didn't really show what they were of. Still, these should be fine since it doesn't look like it took whole screenshots or promo materials for its art.
@argh4430 I have the French edition of the Zelda and FF7 books and they are devoid of artworks (cover excepted for FF7)
@MarinaKat You have a good point. Payday for me is this week anyways so I might as well. Let's back this thing!
@Kosmo that's weird. In the pitch video, we see the guy flipping through pages in one book, and stopped on one where it had a full-page graphic. He even mentioned the book was all in black and white, which would be weird to say if the book was just print and no pictures.
@argh4430 Then it's not just a translation...
@Kosmo I looked again, and it was the Dark Souls book that had the picture, and it was nearly after the cover itself. Maybe it's just restricted to that, tben.
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