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According to Wikipedia, the book was originally published by Paolini's parents' company "Paolini International". It was later "discovered by novelist Carl Hiaasen, who brought it to the attention of Alfred A. Knopf. The re-published version was released on August 26, 2003", after "another round of editing".

Is there any information about what edits were made for the Knopf version? How significant were the edits?

The pre-Knopf version are available for second-hand purchase, but for a large sum. Looking at some metadata, the number of pages appears to be less in the original.

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  • After some searching I found a Youtube video on Paolini's channel where he talks about some changes, namely that "the self-published edition is about fifteen thousand words longer than the Random House edition. We tightened up a lot of traveling during editing"
    – rovyko
    Mar 23, 2023 at 1:06
  • Personally, I'm more curious about how much of the introduction scene was present in the original version.
    – rovyko
    Mar 23, 2023 at 1:06
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    So like I have digitally compared the differences between the two books, but I have no idea how to turn that into an answer. The plot is pretty much identical, but there's hundreds if not thousands of changed throughout the book. Nearly every paragraph has at least one sentence that was rewritten.
    – ibid
    Mar 24, 2023 at 8:03
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    If you specifically are interested in the prologue, I posted a full comparison here a few years ago.. Note that these types of changes are present throughout the entire book.
    – ibid
    Mar 24, 2023 at 8:07

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It's not much, but Paolini has a video on his Youtube channel [1] where he mentions a few changes made to the original edition. Regarding text changes, there is one important quote

So as you can see, this is the book. We had blurbs on the back and a horrible self-portrait of mine that I did in about five minutes. And we have very, very small type inside because we were trying to save space. So the self-published edition is about fifteen thousand words longer than the Random House edition. We tightened up a lot of traveling during editing.

So the number of pages would appear to be larger in the newer version due to the larger type size, but the overall content is shorter as some of the "traveling" bits were removed. It's not clear if the "traveling" is just a significant part or the entirety of the ~15,000 words cut.

  1. Christopher Paolini Discusses the Self-Published Edition of Eragon
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