Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsFirst book bigger in width and height than the other two books?
Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2020
Great book so far, what can I say? It's a touchstone of science fiction. Ordered the first three books separately (because it was actually slightly cheaper to do that than get the box set) and kind of surprised the first book is larger in width and height than the other two. It's not a big deal I guess but kind of defeats the purpose of getting three books from a series that match each other. I just thought this was odd enough to mention in a review.
UPDATE: Figured it out, the first book is actually in Trade Paperback format; the other two are the NEW Mass Market Paperbacks. Unfortunately on Amazon, the latter is being sold without delineation as the "Paperback" option, often with the "Mass Market" option seeming to be OLDER editions of the MMP size. This is also true for the 6 book (unboxed) set that I later purchased twice, trying to get the rest of the books in the bigger size.
Note: I prefer the bigger size because it stays open when laid on a flat surface or in your lap. That sold it for me. On top of that, the font looks better somehow, and the narrow size just looked and felt kind of weird because the font size was the same but the pages are so narrow (I had an older edition of the first book that was MMP size but smaller font so it didn't look and read weird).
In all my frustrated searches on Amazon, it seemed really unusually difficult to find the rest of the books in the larger Trade Paperback size, so for your sake, here's what I figured out after way too much time: A) The official BOXED set is the Trade Paperback size of the first book. B) Or, if you are like me and only wanted to get the first few books in Trade Paperback size, go to the Penguin Random House website, find the individual Dune books, select "Paperback", and click on their Amazon link to buy it here (they also link to other major book dealers, if you prefer). I managed to find books two, three, and four this way., which were the only ones I really wanted anyway.
Note that as of writing this, the second and third books in Trade Paperback size on Amazon are both $9.99 each (same price as the NEW MMP books) but God Emperor is almost full price at $16.99 for some reason.