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Free Books on CD?
FosterSJC asks: "I go to St. John's College, Annapolis, home of the Great Books Program, for almost 70 years. This neoclassical method of education was developed and instituted in the late '30s by Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan. We have a set syllabus that every student reads in a set order of the course of his/her four years at the college - all primary sources and in all subjects, Lab, Math, Language, Music, and Seminar. Taking a hint, partially, from the OSS CD thread a few weeks back, and this thread, I would like any and all advice about compiling a CD to give to freshman, and anyone else for that matter, containing as many of the Great Books as possible. Since most all are in the public domain (very few 20th century authors), the trick would be finding them, sorting them, organizing them, and making sure you have the highest quality translations as well (the biggest problem with the Public Domain versions of these books). Please help."
I don't know if this is true or not, but the thought occurred to me that perhaps good translations of the texts might actually be recent (and therefore not in the public domain)?
Project Gutenberg may well have a lot of the books you want.
And I quote: "The Harvard Classics The Shelf of Fiction Selected by Charles W. Eliot, LLD The most comprehensive and well-researched anthology of all time comprises both the 50-volume "5-foot shelf of books" and the the 20-volume Shelf of Fiction. Together they cover every major literary figure, philosopher, religion, folklore and historical subject through the twentieth century.
NEW YORK: P.F. COLLIER & SON, 1909-1917, NEW YORK: BARTLEBY.COM, 2001, The Harvard Classics
VOL. I. --- His Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin --- Journal, by John Woolman --- Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn
II. --- The Apology, Phædo and Crito of Plato --- The Golden Sayings of Epictetus --- The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
III. --- Essays, Civil and Moral & The New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon --- Areopagitica & Tractate on Education, by John Milton --- Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne
IV. --- Complete Poems Written in English, by John Milton
V. --- Essays and English Traits, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
VI. --- Poems and Songs, by Robert Burns --- VII. --- The Confessions of Saint Augustine --- The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis --- VIII. --- Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, The Furies & Prometheus Bound of --- Aeschylus --- Oedipus the King & Antigone of Sophocles --- Hippolytus & The Bacchæ of Euripides --- The Frogs of Aristophanes
IX. --- On Friendship, On Old Age & Letters, by Cicero --- Letters, by Pliny the Younger
X. --- Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
XI. --- The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
XII. --- Lives, by Plutarch
XIII. --- Æneid, by Vergil
XIV. --- Don Quixote, Part 1, by Cervantes
XV. --- The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan --- The Lives of Donne and Herbert, by Izaak Walton
XVI. --- Stories from the Thousand and One Nights
XVII. --- Fables, by Æsop --- Household Tales, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm --- Tales, by Hans Christian Andersen
XVIII. --- All for Love, by John Dryden --- The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan --- She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith --- The Cenci, by Percy Bysshe Shelley --- A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, by Robert Browning --- Manfred, by Lord Byron --- XIX. --- Faust, Part I, Egmont & Hermann and Dorothea, by J.W. von Goethe --- Dr. Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe
XX. --- The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
XXI. --- I Promessi Sposi, by Alessandro Manzoni
XXII. --- The Odyssey of Homer
XXIII. --- Two Years before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
XXIV. --- On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French --- Revolution & A Letter to a Noble Lord, by Edmund Burke
XXV. --- Autobiography & On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill --- Characteristics, Inaugural Address at Edinburgh & Sir Walter Scott, by --- Thomas Carlyle
XXVI. --- Life Is a Dream, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca --- Polyeucte, by Pierre Corneille --- Phædra, by Jean Racine --- Tartuffe, by Molière --- Minna von Barnhelm, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing --- Wilhelm Tell, by Friedrich von Schiller
XXVII. English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay
XXVIII. Essays: English and American
XXIX. The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin
XXX. --- Scientific Papers
XXXI. --- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
XXXII. --- Literary and Philosophical Essays
XXXIII. --- Voyages and Travels: Ancient and Modern
XXXIV. --- Discourse on Method, by René Descartes --- Letters on the English, by Voltaire --- On the Inequality among Mankind & Profession of Faith of a Savoyard --- Vicar, by Jean Jacques Rousseau --- Of Man, Being the First Part of Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes
XXXV. --- The Chronicles of Jean Froissart --- The Holy Grail, by Sir Thomas Malory --- A Description of Elizabethan England, by William Harrison
XXXVI. --- The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli --- The Life of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper --- Utopia, by Sir Thomas More --- The Ninety-Five Thesis, Address to the Christian Nobility & Concerning --- Christian Liberty, by Martin Luther
XXXVII. --- Some Thoughts Concerning Education, by John Locke --- Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics --- and Atheists, by George Berkeley --- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume
XXXVIII. --- The Oath of Hippocrates --- Journeys in Diverse Places, by Ambroise Paré --- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, by William Harvey --- The Three Original Publications on Vaccination Against Smallpox, by Edward Jenner --- The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, by Oliver Wendell Holmes --- On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, by Joseph Lister --- Scientific Papers, by Louis Pasteur --- Scientific Papers, by Charles Lyell
XXXIX. --- Prefaces and Prologues
XL. --- English Poetry I: Chaucer to Gray
XLI. --- English Poetry II: Collins to Fitzgerald
XLII. --- English Poetry III: Tennyson to Whitman
XLIII. --- American Historical Documents: 1000-1904
XLIV. --- Confucian: The Sayings of Confucius --- Hebrew: Job, Psalms & Ecclesiastes --- Christian I: Luke & Acts
XLV. --- Christian II: Corinthians I & II & Hymns --- Buddhist: Writings --- Hindu: The Bhagavad-Gita --- Mohammedan: Chapters from the Koran
XLVI. --- Edward the Second, by Christopher Marlowe --- Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth & The Tempest, by William Shakespeare
XLVII. --- The Shoemaker's Holiday, by Thomas Dekker --- The Alchemist, by Ben Jonson --- Philaster, by Beaumont and Fletcher --- The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster --- A New Way to Pay Old Debts, by Philip Massinger
XLVIII. --- Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works, by Blaise Pascal
XLIX. --- Epic & Saga: Beowulf, The Song of Roland, The Destruction of Dá --- Derga's Hostel & The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs
LI. --- Lectures on the Harvard Classics
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
Man, I've heard of the five-year plan, and even the six-year plan, but the 70-year plan is pretty ridiculous.
Maybe you should just take some classes at your local community college for a while!
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
The problem with your wanting to use the latest translations is that they will be under copyright, even if the original works aren't. However, something being better than nothing, older translations should still suffice for a free cd.
Of course, as most likely already mentioned, you can get most of the "great" books at the Project Gutenberg website (http://gutenberg.net/).
But with that, maybe this is another great legal thing that P2P can come to the rescue of? Firing up KaZaA Lite, I was able to find PDFs of many of the same books that Gutenberg only has in ASCII form (PDF, in my mind, would be a lot nicer to read and could also retain graphics, styles and fonts). Maybe eDonkey has them too? You can always check for them at Share Reactor or Share Live...
Jowett translations of Plato, for instance, are easily not the top choices of anyone I know who reads Plato seriously. The only exceptions I can think of this are the ancient Greek mathematical works. It is hard to mess up a translation of Euclid, though some of the Univ. Chicago Apollonius and Archimedes texts did manage to screw up the diamgrams.
;)
Pretty much you have two choices for "complete" Great Books sets: the Harvard set, mentioned here, and the Univ. Chicago's Great Books of the Modern World sets.
I attended a Great Books College in southern California (Thomas Aquinas College) and found neither to my liking, but instead spent a small fortune on individual editions. Note to Cliff: Great Books encompasses far more than literature. Philosophy, science, mathematics all have great seminal sources.
Project Gutenberg is as close as the ideal of freely available good English texts gets, but an eclectic choice of web sites, such as Euclid's elements online, also goes a long way toward satieting the desire to know without having to get up from your computer and trot over to your nearest library. Google is the liberally educated man's best friend.
Finally, for those interested in Aquinas in Latin, see www.tacalumni.org/aquinas
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
I've compiled a (growing) list of free book sites here:
5
http://www.nosleep.ca/links/view_group.php?id=4
Gutenberg (which has been mentioned) is in there, as well as a few others. I also find it useful, although potentially illegal for you Americans, to search the australian, or canadian archives, as both have a shorter copywright timeline (author's life + 50 years).
Try http://www.blackmask.com Free books a la Gutenberg, even has a CD of books to offer.
Netscape (no installation needed, early version)
selecting an item from the [global] table of con-
tents brings up a call for the disc it's on, ie
if necessary.
It's an example worth updating & emulating IMO.
Actually the opposite is the case. I'll use your Rush Limbaugh example.
Take for example the translation of Republican and Democrat. A modern European might translate Republican as "Christian Democrat" and Democrat "Labor Party". 500 years from now those words might not make any sense and a more generic "center-right" "center-left" translation might be a better choice; or some other alternate analogy.
More importantly the whole notion of what seperates political parties (primarily economics) might have disappeared. Environmental policy (just to pick a random example) might be the dominant axis and a something like "right wing" might make someone think that the defining features of the Republicans were their environmental stances.
In other words a translater should probably come from the same culture as the reader. BTW discussions of translations of Dante provide an excellent example in the modern day since:
a) Dante is old enough to be difficult
b) Dante is complex enough that a pure translation is highly misleading
c) Dante's use of language is complex
d) Dante is not religious so people more objective than they are with other old books
e) Dante is important enough that large numbers of people have considered the issue
but the 70-year plan is pretty ridiculous.
The 95-year plan is even worse.
(I get the joke, but here's what OP was trying to say: OP meant that St John's College has had the Great Books Program for 70 years, and OP goes to St. John's College.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
I also find it useful, although potentially illegal for you Americans, to search the australian, or canadian archives, as both have a shorter copywright timeline (author's life + 50 years).
Illegal? Or just civil disobedience? I'm a US citizen and resident, and I'm mirroring a dozen or so non-US books on my web site. If (like me) you feel that you have little to lose, and you're not afraid to sit in the front of the proverbial bus, come with me and practice some civil disobedience of unjust and possibly unconstitutional laws. But don't try it with your school's name on it, as the school has much more to lose than you have.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The UPenn Online Books Page is an index to a total of more 17,000 online books in various locations. This includes all of the 3000-plus Project Gutenberg texts.
(Note that the Project Gutenberg texts are nice because they're in a completely plain-vanilla ASCII format, each work is in a single file, and the formatting conventions are fairly uniform across the collection).
Oh, don't overlook Project Gutenberg of Australia, as they offer quite a few works from around 1920 to 1950 which are in copyright in the U. S. but not in Australia. Wait, forget I said that.
Pretty impressive: at 17,000 works, the Internet is finally starting to approach the capacity of a (small) physical library. A major university library still is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger, however...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
So, Mickey Mouse and Winnie The Pooh are no longer copyright protected in Canada?
Wrong. Walt Disney died in December 1966 and was cremated; the copyright on Mickey Mouse does not expire until January 1, 2017, under the copyright term in force in Canada and Australia. If the Supremes cooperate, the USA may get free Mickey before Canada does.
A. A. Milne, author of the Pooh books, died in 1956. E. H. Shepard, who created the original "classic Pooh" drawings, died in 1976.
However, Mickey may have actually fallen out of copyright in the United States due to a faulty copyright notice.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Between Project Gutenberg, the MIT Internet Classics Archive and various other sources available online what I'd like to know is why didn't someone at St. John's think of doing this before now?
While I haven't tried the WHOLE book list yet, I have built up a collection of ALL the first-year booklist in less than one and a half hours usuing ONLY PG and classics.mit.edu. Every title that was NOT available at PG was available at the MIT site and it was all HTML to boot (which in my mind, at least, is vastly preferable for reading than plain ASCII text).
utter rubbish
If you can afford tuition at St. Johns, you can afford a couple of fucking books. When I applied (and got in. At 18, it wasn't my bag, but the curriculum was much more appealing a few years later) I think it cost in the mid 20's. Ten years later? I don't want to imagine.
Anyway, hit Project Gutenberg. Make your own compilation CD.
Have they finally cut down that tree on campus? It was pretty sickly in 1990. If it's still standing, it must be with the help of a scaffold.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I'm not only an anonymous coward, I'm lazy as well so I'm not going to check the curriculum, but http://books.mirror.org has links to numerous public domain texts online, many in html format as well as contextual/biographical information about the authors. Maybe it's not strictly what was asked for but it might help.
See my sig.
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