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Free Books on CD?

Posted by Cliff on from the perpetuating-literature dept.

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."

3 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Public domain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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)?

    1. Re:Public domain by mary_will_grow · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I had the same thought, but then, why would recent translations be any better than an older one? Translations made in roughly the same time period are likely to have more contextual clues as to what the author meant in certain cases. While we might THINK we have a grasp of the various aspects of life in a certain long-ago period, it is highly likely that the resources we used to develop this "grasp" left out certain things. Maybe even critical things. We may have more research at our disposal these days, but can you really compare that to actually BEING in that time period? Who knows what spin was put on the stuff we assume is factual. Imagine some futureboy trying to piece our culture together using some books by Rush Limbaugh. hahah.
      So my gut instinct would be to go with an older translation. But who knows? No one, right? heheheh.

      --
      Why stick up for big business?
  2. Re:UPenn Online Books: 17,000 total by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    A major university library still is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger, however...

    The only people who can read each book have to crowd around that book though. On the internet that 17,000 texts can be transmited to billions of people.