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Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth, 3rd edition, by Michael Martinez |
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Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth, 3rd edition by Michael Martinez
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About Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth, 3rd edition
In the Fall of 1996, Michael Martinez began writing a collection of essays which he combined into a popular Web-book called Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth. The essays proved to be so popular that students, teachers, and librarians around the world frequently wrote to the author, seeking his permission to print them out for classwork and research. Several graduate students used Parma Endorion as a source for their Ph.D. and/or Master's theses. 
By 1998, demand for help in printing out the essays had become so overwhelming that Martinez updated the essays and completely redesigned the Web site. Still, as popular as the Web-book had proven to be, something else was needed. Early in 2000, Martinez recruited fan artists Rich Sullivan and Anke Eissman to help assemble an electronic book version of the popular Web site. The artists contributed several of their drawings/paintings, as featured on popular sites like TheOneRing.Net and Tolkien Online, to produce a vibrantly illustrated eBook unlike anything online Tolkien fandom has ever seen before. Martinez also reached out across the sea, seeking help in translating the essays into other languages. Although three translation projects were started, only the Spanish edition is expected to see publication before the end of 2002. Nonetheless, when Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth, 3rd edition was published on Free-Ebooks.Net, hopes were high and nearly a year's worth of work in updating the essays, selecting artwork, and preparing the eBook format was brought to fruition. The Parma Endorion eBook was released on January 5, 2002. By January 25, it was proclaimed the top download for the year 2002 by Eva Almeida, publisher of the eBooks'n'Bytes newsletter. Garnering over 4,000 downloads on its first day, the eBook had to be moved to a new server almost immediately. By the end of January, more than 25,000 copies had been retrieved by excited Tolkien fans. 50,000 downloads were achieved by mid-April, and the 100,000 download mark was passed in mid-September. By the end of October, 2002, more than 130,000 copies of Parma Endorion had been downloaded from the Free-eBooks.net server. But the true number of distributed copies will never be known, for by June the eBook was being passed around peer-to-peer networks and made available on at least one binary news group. Some unscrupulous individual even dared to sell a few copies over eBay before concerned Tolkien fans reported the fraudulent sales in August. Long recognized as one of the Internet's leading experts on J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, Michael Martinez brings more than 20 years of research and love of Tolkien to this latest edition of Parma Endorion. While all parties agree that the unprecedented success of the eBook certainly owes something to the timely release of Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies, Parma Endorion had already established itself as a widely respected resource. Download this eBook from Free-eBooks.net. You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader (it's a free download). About the author Michael Martinez has been actively discussing the works of J.R.R. Tolkien with other fans through online services and the Internet since 1993. He has studied Tolkien's world intensively since first reading The Lord of the Rings in 1975. As an active member of fandom, Martinez organized and directed the first fan programming track dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-earth at Dragoncon in 2000 and 2001. Martinez also writes a monthly column on Tolkien and Middle-earth for MERP.Com, and has advised several companies about the works of Tolkien, especially concerning Middle-earth. Martinez also wrote the free eBook Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth, 3rd edition and created one of the first, if not the first, Web-based forums devoted to Tolkien and the Inklings in October, 1997. The author also established the longest-running continuously updated Tolkien movie news information site, and the original Lord of the Rings movie news and information page in February 1998. Michael Martinez' next book, Understanding Middle-earth, will be published by Vivisphere in the fall of 2003. |
This page is copyright © 1997-2006 by Tolkien Scholar Michael L. Martinez. All rights reserved. |