u/PaulloDEC

Thanks to everyone for the great response to the Zork Game Book web viewer I posted recently! A few folks rightly suggested that there ought to be a traditional e-book option for these titles too, so here's that; all four books as EPUB files.

Downloads via Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1N0hTRSnjxaHwtrvu-2KfYxQAjsHkXSLf?usp=drive_link

There's a couple of caveats with these, so please read before proceeding.

1. These books have many full-page illustrations, and the only way most users (with the exception of those using devices that can show two-page spreads) will see them is to turn the pages manually. All instances of "Turn to page X" have hyperlinks that will jump you directly to the specified page, but using them will result in the full-page illustrations being entirely skipped over. So if you want to experience all the illustrations, get ready to flip some pages.

2. Users of Apple Books may encounter a bug where hyperlinks jump to the wrong page; specifically one page too far. Reddit user FNTKB brought this one to my attention, but we've had no luck in confirming the cause or finding a solution. If you're an EPUB/Apple Books expert and you've got any ideas, please let me know!

3. Be aware that larger font sizes on your viewer will result in material (both text and images) being pushed onto additional pages. Not a big deal, but you may notice pages without page numbers as a result of this; rest assured the hyperlinks will still work correctly.

Massive thanks to reddit user FNTKB, who provided invaluable assistance in both testing these books on additional platforms and rooting out bugs that I'd have certainly missed. The final files are greatly improved as a result of their patience and expertise.

Finally, while these have been tested and checked in every way I know how, I've learned that stuff will always go wrong in unexpected ways. If you uncover any issues, please let me know in the comments, along with what kind of viewer/device you were using, and I'll endeavor to provide updated files in the same Google Drive folder.

Next up, it's four classic 1980s Zork-flavoured "Choose Your Own Adventure" books (or rather, the much less catchy "What Do I Do Now?" if you want to get technical), reproduced as an interactive website. Sick of getting sore fingers from the laborious task of turning pages? Now you can click your way to victory!

CHECK THEM OUT HERE!

This project actually started before the novel e-books, but ended up being a lot more complex and time-consuming. Like the e-books, all four of these books had to be screen-capped, cropped, cleaned and processed with OCR software, then tidied up, reformatted and eventually plugged into the web application. Additionally the illustrations had their own challenges; books one and two ought to look the nicest, as I actually purchased physical copies and produced new scans from which to extract them. Books three and four currently use lower-quality scans as their basis; I'll update them when and if I can get those books physically at a reasonable price. The front and back covers were also recreated using matching fonts and restored cover art.

This next bit might be unpopular; while a ton of human work went into this project, the actual coding of the web application was done using GenAI tools like Claude and Gemini. I've no web development background, so producing something like this by hand is totally outside of my skillset. Some of you may find this disappointing, and I'm hoping to produce some e-book versions as well that will sidestep the website entirely.

Please let me know if you spot any issues with any of the books, be they transcription errors or technical issues using the site. I would very much recommend using a desktop PC rather than a mobile device - I have no idea how badly borked these will be on mobile. And if you can think of any features that you think would benefit the user experience, I'm happy to hear those too. Enjoy!

That's right, it's another instalment of "Somehow, obscure Zork media returned"!

This time we're stepping out of the digital realm and into the world of official Zork (and Zork adjacent) prose. Presented here are four novels:

• The Lost City of Zork by Robin W Bailey
• The Zork Chronicles by George Alec Effinger
• Enchanter by Robin W Bailey
• Wishbringer by Craig Shaw Gardner

Thanks to the work of dedicated fans, these books have been available as scanned pages for many years in places like The Internet Archive. But with advances in OCR tools, it was now possible for me to convert these pages back into editable text with no compromise to accuracy.

With the hard part out of the way, all that was left was to tidy up the formatting and repackage them in the most widely-supported e-book format, EPUB, for folks to enjoy.

Download the Zork Books here.

Download the Zork-Adjacent Books Here.

The caveat here is that while I've been as careful as possible, I've not actually read these books through in search of errors. The conversion process is shockingly accurate, so if there's any issues they're most likely my fault - if you spot anything, please let me know! I'll be glad to make updates and replace the files with improved versions.