When I heard that the release date was published my first thought was YES!! and then I actually saw the date and my thought was WTF!!. My take is this. TOR has a captive audience and that audience has been EXTREMELY patient for the past 7 or so years while Jordan went through his unfortunate illness that took him from us, so I appreciate the difficulties in finding a new writer and finishing this series off. But:

1) First we were told that the last book would be THE LAST BOOK even if you had to pick it up with a forklift.

2) Then we were told that it wasn't feasible to make it one book so the decision was to make it three books. And each book would take a year and come out in November.

3) So, the first two books come out on schedule and cleared up a lot of material and plot lines.

4) So November comes in 2011 and the last book is AWOL. A lot of speculation ensues and we figure that ok, something happened so we look forward to sometime in 2012.

And now we find out that for the sake of ...whatever, TOR is holding the book until 2013 so that the end book is published the same month as EOTW. Are you kidding me? Way to treat the faithful, and if you think that this won't cause some of the faithful to look negatively on this series then you're fooling yourselves. For myself I've already donated my copies to the local library and once the final book comes out I will read it once or twice and then never utter the words Wheel of time ever again.

Take care folks.

I agree with most on this..to a point. The issue, for me, with holding the book due to marketing concerns is that WoT has a large population of people who are waiting, and waiting for this last book to come out so we can finish the series. I submit that the publisher could release this book on a Sunday morning at 3am and the line would still be around the block to purchase this book..so the concept of waiting until the holiday season holds no water for me. Take the time necessary to make sure this final book is as good as it can be..certainly, but to make us wait for more months simply because the publisher thinks it isn't the right time?..somewhat insulting.

just my two cents.