It was Technogeekagain who mentioned paperback prices, not me.
Zelazny wrote in an era when sci-fi/fantasy tended to be shorter, and my vague impression is that his stuff was short even by those standards. These days standards are different, and that’s fine. I don’t have a problem with long stories, and I like a multi-volume epic as much as the next geek, but 1200-page volumes are a serious logistical problem for readers. They’re hard to fit in your bag or your pocket, hard to keep open one-handed, and they wear out more quickly. If an author has written a single-volume epic that just absolutely can’t be split into smaller parts, I can sort of sympathize, but the Chronicles of Amber was originally written as two standalone series, each of which could fit nicely into one comfortably fat 600-ish-page book, so shoehorning them both into one impractically large volume just seems pointlessly awkward.
Speaking for myself, I would like to own a two-volume copy of the Chronicles, but I won’t buy a single-volume copy. I’ve felt the same way about phone-book-sized comic collections, like the one-volume edition of Bone. I’ll happily pay more for multi-volume collections that aren’t a pain in the ass to read.
As I recall, there’s was a SyFy series in the works that sputtered out before it got filmed.
The rights to Amber are a complicated thing - Zelazny didn’t update his will after having a messy divorce, so now the ex-wife who doesn’t think highly of the late author or his books controls the rights.
That said, though, I have a hard time recommending Amber to friends now, though I love the books myself. The female part is, as they say, a little underwritten.
I found The Amber Chronicles pretty disappointing. In both trilogies, I felt as if the principle narrative arc was setting up for a confrontation that, in the end, didn’t turn out to be particularly interesting or meaningful, and the main characters didn’t seem to be interested anymore anyway. The possibilities of infinite parallel worlds scarcely seemed thought about. And the grand climax of the story turned out to amount to two college buddies deciding to go out for beers and catch up on things.
