The Long Journey by Johannes V. Jensen — Creating the definitive e-book

Johannes V. Jensen won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1944 in part due to his epic series—in English composed of three volumes Fire and Ice, The Cimbrians, and Christopher Columbus—that created a type of alternative Genesis myth for the rise of man til the time of Christopher Columbus. All six novels (each of the above volumes contained two books) were eventually compiled into The Long Journey (in Danish, Den Lange Rejse).

Having come across the book and reading brief passages, I was intrigued. However, the only available electronic copies of the book were located at The Long Journey by Johannes V. Jensen. While this was a good start, and the PDF was especially helpful, the EPUB and other ebook versions were badly formatted, contained errors, and had a host of other issues. I've thus embarked on a journey to create a workable ebook version of this magnificent work, which is especially useful for anyone trying to use text-to-speech.

Some notes on what fixes have been made:

• Used a combination of regular expressions and manual editing to identify obvious errata.
• Removed all header/footer text.
• Cleaned up conversion-related errata (e.g. • and ■ or incorrect mid-word line breaks) due to irregularities in the PDF.
• Formatted paragraphs properly, the original conversion had most paragraphs broken up by hard line breaks.
• Added ebook table of contents for all the books, sub-books, and chapters. Also added an inline ToC.
• Fixed cross-page text breaks.
• Eliminated odd text symbols and errata at chapter beginning due to drop caps being used in the first paragraph's initial letter.
• Added in covers for each of the individual volumes (Fire and Ice, The Cimbrians, and Christopher Columbus) along with the main cover.

Since I haven't been able to comb over every paragraph in detail yet, I will continue to edit and upload new e-book versions as I find additional errors that cropped up from the PDF to text conversion. In addition, I aim to improve the formatting, especially for the various song passages throughout the novel. If you spot significant errors, please let me know in the comments below. I will post a review of the book once I've finished reading it.

I've included the Calibre conversions to EPUB and MOBI formats (with some tweaking from the base output) along with the raw HTML that I did the majority of the editing on.

• The_Long_Journey_Johannes_V_Jensen.epub
• The_Long_Journey_Johannes_V_Jensen.mobi
• The_Long_Journey_Johannes_V_Jensen.html