The "maintaining the element of surprise for the audience" is the crucial part of this whole announcement, methinks. We just won't know what exactly Abrams, Kasdan and company are gonna do with this thing until we see that first trailer, although I'm sure many a news leak will happen between now and then.
I look at that photo from the first table reading and I just want to start mapping the EU characters onto the new cast. "Oh, Daisy Ridley is clearly playing Jaina!" I want to exclaim. But then I remember not to get my hopes up.
You gotta wonder if there's gonna be a huge backlash to all of this. As noted earlier in the thread, a lot of fans on fb, tfn and elsewhere are pretty pissed about this already. I can't say I blame them. The money fans spent just on the books published since the early 90's probably totals well over a billion dollars by this point. It's that much less money George would've had to make the prequels with. Indeed, I can't help but see a parrallel with a common complaint we all have about buying the OOT on multiple formats over the decades, one of our greatest justifications for demanding that those versions be restored.
Yes, I know what you're thinking. "But that's a bad comparison. Lucasfilm isn't locking the old books away in a vault like the OOT. They're even reprinting them for the umpteenth time." Yeah, but they're also suddenly and without warning saying "sorry, but those books, retroactively, no longer count as the official continuation of the story even though that's exactly what we said they were. Thank you for the money, though."
Lucasfilm killed off Chewie to move more copies of Vector Prime and now they might be bringing him back just to sell more tickets to Episode VII. I really think they should've had a contingency plan in place. Hell, I thought keeping Han, Luke and Leia alive in the books was the contingency plan.
After spending 20 years chronicling the big three's adventures in print form, I think a return to the big screen owes the fans a little more than just "sorry, but that never happened."
I dunno, maybe I'm overreacting to this. If Episode VII surprises me and ends up a solid film I probably won't care that they've overwritten the post-Jedi EU (if, in fact, that's what they're doing).