BIONICLE Legends books digitized

I had never read any of the BIONICLE books, and one day I was curious about the journey of the Matoran before they transform into Toa Inika (I may not had read the books, but I have read the wiki so I’m very familiar with all the BIONICLE history). Although the book is available in pdf in internet, it’s an ugly scan, so I diceded to recreate the book in pdf text format imitating the book style, and then I get carried away. So far I have:

  • BIONICLE Legends 1: Island of Doom
  • BIONICLE Legends 2: Dark Destiny
  • BIONICLE Legends 3: Power Play
  • BIONICLE Legends 4: Legacy of Evil
  • BIONICLE Legends 5: Inferno
  • BIONICLE Legends 6: City of the Lost
  • BIONICLE Legends 7: Prisoners of the Pit
  • BIONICLE Legends 8: Downfall
  • BIONICLE Legends 9: Shadows in the Sky
  • BIONICLE Legends 10: Swamp of Secrets
  • BIONICLE Legends 11: The Final Battle

And you can read them all in HERE.

Some questions you may have:

  • Why bother?
    The scans are ugly and I had spare time to kill.
  • Isn’t this illegal?
    Shhhhh.
  • Do you plan to continue the work with the rest of the BIONICLE books?
    Yes. I don’t really know, I don’t work on this in a schedule. The first book I completed in one week at most, and the last one it was in stand-by at least one month.
  • Did you transcribe the text by hand?
    I’m not a masochist! At first I used an OCR site to transform the PDF photos into a ugly Word text document. Now I use Biological Chronicle text. I copy and paste the text to a Word document that have the correct format. I make sure the text have the same dispotition than in the books (words at the end of the line, hyphens, and so on)
  • I found a mistake, may I tell you?
    First, how dare you to said my work have mistakes? Second, sure, I will fix them as soon as I can.
  • What is beauty?
    I really can’t answer that, 'cause that falls within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy.
  • Hotel?
    Trivago
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Thank you, this is definitely an improvement over grainy scans.

Do you think you would ever consider scanning a book with pictures such as the Rahi or Dark Hunter guide? I understand that would take more work having to cut out and “restore” pictures that went with entries but it would be lovely to finally have a read.

I solve practical problems!
-Engineer Gaming

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I don’t have any book, so all the work I have done is with what I get in the internet.
The books are available is BioMedia Project and all the photos should be in Biosector, so it shouldn’t be hard to digitized it, but I doubt I would ever do it. The pages design is also more complex, so it would requiere to work in a program like Indesign.

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Yeah, I had a feeling you would say that and I totally get that. Much too tedious.

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Nice work.

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This is very impressive the way you’ve recreated them! The font especially I’m amazed you were able to recreate. You might also be interested in Biological Chronicle, which attempts a similar pdf archival. I’d link directly to their website, but it’s down until the 10th.

I’m not a lawyer, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but they’re not exactly in print anymore, so I don’t think LEGO or Scholastic lawyers will be breaking down your door :wink:

I solve practical problems.

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This could be useful for when I’m trying to search key words to check stuff.

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I suspected that someone has already digitized the books, but at least they don’t have the same format, so I guess I didn’t waste my time. In fact, this should make easier my work.
About the font, the text use Gill Sans MT meanwhile the titles use TradeMarker. The bionicle font on the other hand is Goudy Trajan Regular.

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Slowly but surely I have made progress with the books. I originally didn’t have any deadline in mind, but when I realized that I was almost finishing the last BIONICLE Legends book and how close to the new year I was, I knew I had to finish before 2023.
So there they are, in the same link, all eleven books that cover the Ignition trilogy.

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