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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."
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...
The older translations may have some literary merit or historical interest in their own right (as may the newer ones, but it is easier to contextualise from a distance). Offering multiple translations from different periods might be a good idea too - especially if they can then be cross-referenced or presented as parallel texts. This might encourage the art of contextual reading, which a study of Great Books presented as isolated cultural fetish-items might tend to discourage...
Experience is a hard school, but fools will learn no other.
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
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