Slashdot Mirror
Amazon's 1,082-volume Classics Collection: $7,989
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Who would buy 828 feet worth of books, for nearly $8,000, that would take 20 years to read at the rate of one title per week? And how much does it cost to ship? The Real Time columnists at the Wall Street Journal Online ponder these and other deep questions raised by Amazon's The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection, whose sheer jaw-dropping enormity reminds them of e-tailers' wacky offers during the dot-com boom. 'We think the collection is a perfect fit for more than a few software engineers we've known -- smart, self-directed people who are eternally curious, yet abhor wasting time intellectually and can't hide their impatience with the fuzziness of liberal arts,' Jason Fry and Tim Hanrahan write. 'For them, here's a pre-selected, pretty comprehensive list of Western classics, assembled for purchase with a single mouse-click -- and available in a form that eschews frills for portability and ease of use. Think of it as Humanities In a Box. OK, a Very Big Box.'"
Ill wait for someone to rip it to an ebook i think.
for Amazon Prime!
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
Doesn't "enormity" mean, horrible crime? Perhaps the author meant "enormousness".
Seems like a convenient way to get that I'm-too-rich-for-the-public-library mansion-library started for the rich and famous.
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast.
So how many have you read on the list?
Complete list here.
I wonder how long it will take for someone to put together a quick script to take the book list and put the same collection out of Gutenberg?
How can they call it a classic collection with no Neuromancer, HTGTG, actually any Sci-Fi?
My personal library is about the same size, including lots of thick computer manuals, and it takes up less than half that.
They probably dropped a decimal point.
If you can't be bothered to figure out for yourself which books you "ought" to read to get a good grasp of western literature, are you going to read the books some people at Amazon think you "ought" to read if they just end up on your shelves? (While lightening your wallet of money better spent on hardware).
I read a lot, and the idea of this is pretty distasteful to me. Sure, you'll get some of the good books, but you'll also get the awful crap that snotty english types swear is "fine literature".
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The person buying it has a rather large insect/ leaf collection?
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
One title per week seems pretty leisurely to me.
I am an ex sotware engineer in my fifties who did exactly this. In my 20's I collected about 2000 core classics so they could always be at hand. I've read most of them too.
I can't say whether they have "improved my life" since the substrate of my perspective now depends upon them. For example, because of them I decided that engineering is too limiting.
But if you have faith that generating interconnections in the brain between sense, experience and imaginitive possibilities is a good thing, then this is the way to go.
The way I usually put books in my shelfs I don't get 828 feet out of (roughly) 1000 books.
$3.99 is a great deal for shipping... but, do they ship to Puerto Rico? I'd really hate to pay that %6.6 tax for it.
--MaxPowerDJ
828 feet for 1082 books... so they measure them lying down, not standing up, like you will encounter books most of the time.
Hey, you can save a whole 30 dollars if you apply for an Amazon credit card!
I can't believe the submitter didn't take the oppourtunity to link to Amazon with a refer code. *THAT* would be referer points worth getting modded down for!
This item does not qualify for free shipping.
SIGFAULT
# See individual DVDs for more details
# Number of discs: 282
Price: $4,999.00
You Save: $2,501.00 (33%)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 6A05RM/qid=1119876469/sr=8-1/102-8399008-3450544?v =glance&s=dvd&n=507846
What a bargain!
OK, they're paperback which means the popular ones would wear out quickly. But if you were feeling philanthropic and wanted to give an otherwise sparse school library a boost, I could see it.
You should probably ask them first, though. I'm picturing Monday morning at the hometown library. The UPS rep knocks on the door to get a signature, and the librarian looks up to a couple semi-loads of books starting to be unloaded in their front yard!
"Well..here I am..." - Jubal Early
For those who want to buy: Amazon link to the collection here!
Browse the Complete Collection by Author here
Browse the Complete Collection by Title Here
But I still think this is better - a quarter of a million dollars for a vinyl record (45 rpm) of every song that charted between 1950 and 1990.
i can reed it out
Why to waste your time to REBOOT? Use Linux!
They won't ship these set for free. I wonder why.
My biggest problem with this is that they call it "Complete Penguin Classics" and not one book on Linux in the entire set!
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
There are many titles listed twice. "Art of War" Twice "The Aeneid" three times "The Epic of Gilgamesh" twice lots more. Dunno if they are counted in the total, but its not very well presented...
can't hide their impatience with the fuzziness of liberal arts
And these same fellows expect to glide through both Gravity's Rainbow and Finnegan's Wake? I thought it was funny in the WSJ article that they mention being spared Ulysses, which is actually readable by your average man, while FW requires you to understand some self-made Gaelic language Joyce made up. Yeah... gonna polish that one off in a weekend.
I agree that the list is a bit odd. You just get a collection of Kafka short stories without including either The Trial or The Castle. Likewise Hesse's Siddartha should probably be paired with or replaced with either Demian or Steppenwolf. In fact this set seems to betray the classic modernist view of literature: pre-colonial, predominantly Western. Though there are some interesting choices. Like The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam. But Borges seems to carry the load for all of South America. And no Rushdie? Murakami? Aren't we missing a hemisphere? And everything seems to stop around Vineland. No DeLillo, Eugenides, Ellis or Eggers. Its like literature stopped with the post-modern singularity.
But Harold Bloom would be agree: the entire body of Shakespeare's work is here. So thus goes the Western Canon. I guess if you are going to buy 900 feet of paperbacks and you're going to get them for 40% off, no need to be choosy.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Cost: $8000 - hmm not likely ill buy that... Shipping: $3.99 - a bargain! must buy! No gift wrapping: Just lost a customer.
Brain(s): 0.0% user, 1.3% system, 0.1% nice, 98.6% idle
but seriously, it'd be much more worth it if they were designed to look like old leather books. you know, like rich old people have in their study. in movies.
barnes and noble has some classic books reprinted in some faux-leather hardcover format (example) which would be much more impressive to have filling up a room.
This looks targeted for those looking to give a home library that 'bling bling' factor. No one would actually read all the books, but I sure can imagine a home decorator setting up a wall of books in the study. Cost less than most leather chairs.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I'd kill to have The Criterion Collection shipped to me in one big box.
.. I want them in one big package..
(Or, one small hard drive.)
Whatever. I just want all those movies..
Anyone know of good movie collection services that rock? I've seen a few of those "Columbia-House" style dealies, where you get one movie a month for 2 years, but that sucks
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It's not 828 ft of shelf space. Amazon description says, "the titles would tower 828 feet if you stacked them atop each other." They mean all of them standing vertically, one atop the other. Since those penguin classics are around 9 inches tall, that works out. Why you would measure books in this totally meaningless way? So that you can claim that they're "almost as tall as the Empire State Building" of course!
Assuming makes an ass of u and Ming.
and if it is, it shouldn't be.
Best Slashdot Co
At the discount price, this is roughly $7 a book. While I may not be able to get them all at once, I sure can get them a lot cheaper other ways. That is the price of new books by well-known authors, and I have a very hard time bringing myself to pay that (I can't help but think of scrimping to save $1.50 to go buy a brand new book each week just 15 years ago). I can't imagine paying those prices for these "classics". No wonder the shipping is so cheap.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Now those I would buy as presents.
ref
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
I've never been a fast reader. In fact, I'd say at best I read only a page or so a minute. But I'm also a very visual person, so I appreciate reading slowly and letting my mind make up it's own movie. The more descriptive the book, the slower I go. My room mate reads probably 3x as fast as I do, but I'm fairly certain he misses a good portion of what he reads, because he doesn't really process it. When you have "book club" type discussions with people, you find out rather quickly who doesn't pay enough attention to the small details. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I figure if I'm going to read a book, I'm going to get the most of it.
That's besides the point that reading is a leisure activity for me, not a goal or accomplishment. There's just no need to race through it.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Just sayin', it isn't unthinkable for an institution to purchase something like this.
Finding God in a Dog
which can be found in
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
After Penguin's involvement in the whole "katie.com" fiasco, I try to avoid buying anything with their name on it (Linux excepted!)
Most (all?) of these titles are in the public domain, so the publisher's only cost is printing. And they're paperbacks. Penguin is making a pretty good margin on these.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
Ways to measure books:
:P
1. Number of Titles
2. Number of Authors
Ways NOT to measure books:
1. Linear Dimension
2. Price
3. Average Reading Time
Please, can we stop with the moronic units of measurement? It could only have been worse if the post broke down to fractions of the Library of Congress.
Somewhere in those hundreds of books are a lot of them that are worth reading, and that would surely improve one's functionality within Western Civilization. Coughing up all that money up front sort of obliges one to actually pull at least some of them off the shelf and read them.
I'm much more likely to finally digest Gilgamesh or some dreaded Faulkner if I already own them, and can easily transport them to the bathroom. If I say, though, "Gee, it's time I finally read some Gilgamesh..." and then have to order or go out and buy a copy... it's not going to happen. Sort of like bench presses. So, it's the literary gym membership you have to use in order to justify, after-the-fact, having spent the money.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
When they would get older classical type books, the kind noone really wanted to buy used to read, but that have the nice old decorated hardback spine, they would line them in a seperate area for "decorative books". People would buy them by the yard as filler, either to fill their library with impressive looking books, or for theater props or whatever. All they really needed to do was look good filling a shelf.
Amazons version of this sounds a bit expensive.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Anything that comes out in series could be analysed this way. If the print runs drop off or are uneven, then the likelyhood of a complete set is rare and from that viewpoint would be a more valuable collector's item.
The same person... "Who would buy a 660 bhp Ferrari, for nearly $770,868, that can do 217.5 mph and turn in a 3.3 second 0-60 mph." They have too much money and/or not enough sense and need to impress people because they are insecure with themselves (a/k/a tiny genital disease). Now go away while I drool over this.
How much extra for the leather binding? Does that add to the shipping weight?
would be burned by the masses of christian fundamentalists descending upon the poor school library?
I fit your general definition, however I don't confine myself to just engineering issues. Why break off one side of the subject of knowledge just because it has no 'science' in it? Curiosity encompasses all things from rockets to poetry. The so called liberal arts are the study of why people act like people.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
if there were only 1024 books. You know, don't want to risk overflowing my bookshelf...
1024 *will* 'overflow' your geek 'bookshelf' if- as you're implying- the number of books it holds has to be contained within 10 bits.
Unless, of course, you're using the class of bookshelves which can *never* be empty, and can thus hold 1-1024 books, instead of 0-1023.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I think I can get Z out of the way this summer # Zadig, L'Ingenu by Francois Voltaire # Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau
well, smart people/people with alot of free time on their hands.. Make the time go fast...
Is it me, or is the per-book price really expensive for paperbacks? This is like 8$/book (or 13/book for original price), what do these classics in paperback form usually go for?
For an additional $50,000, order our PC Jukebox -- all 20,000 of your 45 rpm records recorded digitally and stored on high-speed hard drives on your brand new PC Jukebox computer. Search by artist, song title, words in song titles, and many other criteria, and prepare electronic music play lists of the songs you want to hear. You will be the only person in the world to own every hit 45 rpm record in digital format! Highly cool
Apparently they haven't been on the Internet lately!
I've got that and more, and you can buy it [Billboard Top 100] from iTunes... feel free to fill in the gaps [copyright battle] songs using any variety of Internet protocols...
Get your Unix fortune now!
Special Shipping Information: This item is not eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping. See details.
I couldnt find many books important to geeks on Gutenberg site.
.. what are the "geek classics"? ..who wants to attempt compiling a list of say top 100.
.. err.. 1927.
.. and Newton's principia .. and don't forget some of the arabic texts too (of Al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Zakariya al-Razi, Al Haitham) and chinese ones etc. That is, the least doesnt have to be "western geek classics".
Actually
To be a classic it has to be published before
I'm reckoning Euclid's Elements be in there
Not if you're reading Crime and Punishment. My god that book is terrible.
When I was a kid somehow I acquired the meme that it was immoral to give up on a book if you didn't like it. I read a lot of bad books, simply because I had them and thus I felt I had to read them. I was in college when I first ran into a book that was so bad that I threw it across the room rather than finish it, but that experience freed me to simply give up and go on to another book when I realised I was wasting my time. That same week I was actually able to box up some books that had been sitting unfinished on my bookshelf for months and donate them to the library. The sense of relief was amazing.
WSJ fails to explain (for ideological reasons?) why Penguin are so desperatly willing to sell such a collection though. Because of expiring copyright most of these titles are in the public domain and will be almost worthless to Penguin within a few years. It is as much a benefit of capitalism at it is "a marketing scheme". But since some corporation might loose money on it some years ahead becasue of their antique business idea I guess it's evil.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
There is a smattering of non-Western literature represented, such as the Bhagavad-Gita and The Art of War. Not a lot, certainly, probably only about 10-20 titles. I'm sure they could do better, but it's good that they're at least including a bit.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
The feature I would really like to see is a `next book in this series' button. It is very difficult to find the next one in a series - particularly if it's still on the first edition which only lists other books by the same author that were published earlier. I generally prefer to buy an entire series at once, so I don't have to wait once I've finished one.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This is a great way of filling up the library in your new McMansion
I dare you to read Walden cover-to-cover in one week and come back to say that. Not only is reading Walden in one week not leisurely at all, but if you actually accomplish that feat your head will explode. It's a widely believed fact!
I have a set of the Harvard Classics on my bookshelf, the "five-foot-shelf" that is a very good collection of Great Books. (http://www.bartleby.com/hc/). Biography, history, drama, literature, fiction, philosophy, science, politics, religion... it's all there. I've been working my way through it for almost twenty years. Well worth having around, as it means you will never lack for high-quality reading material.
My alma mater, the University of Chicago (http://www.uchicago.edu/), is very much a Great Books kind of place. Here's a good list to start with (from "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, 1972):
1. Homer (9th Century B.C.?)
Iliad
Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus (c.525-456 B.C.)
Tragedies
4. Sophocles (c.495-406 B.C.)
Tragedies
5. Herodotus (c.484-425 B.C.)
History
6. Euripides (c.485-406 B.C.)
Tragedies
(esp. Medea, Hippolytus, The Bacchae)
7. Thucydides (c.460-400 B.C.)
History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates (c.460-377? B.C.)
Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes (c.448-380 B.C.)
Comedies
(esp. The Clouds, The Birds, The Frogs)
10. Plato (c.427-347 B.C.)
Dialogues
(esp. The Republic, Symposium, Phaedo, Meno, Apology, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Sophist, Theaetetus)
11. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Works
(esp. Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, The Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics)
12. Epicurus (c.341-270 B.C.)
Letter to Herodotus
Letter to Menoeceus
13. Euclid (fl.c. 300 B.C.)
Elements
14. Archimedes (c.287-212 B.C.)
Works
(esp. On the Equilibrium of Planes, On Floating Bodies, The Sand-Reckoner)
15. Apollonius of Perga (fl.c.240 B.C.)
Conic Sections
16. Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
Works
(esp. Orations, On Friendship, On Old Age)
17. Lucretius (c.95-55 B.C.)
On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil (70-19 B.C.)
Works
19. Horace (65-8 B.C.)
Works
(esp. Odes and Epodes, The Art of Poetry)
20. Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17)
History of Rome
21. Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17)
Works
(esp. Metamorphoses)
22. Plutarch (c.45-120)
Parallel Lives
Moralia
23. Tacitus (c.55-117)
Histories
Annals
Agricola
Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa (fl.c. 100 A.D.)
Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus (c.60-120)
Discourses
Encheiridion (Handbook)
26. Ptolemy (c.100-170; fl. 127-151)
Almagest
27. Lucian (c.120-c.190)
Works
(esp. The True Way to Write History, The True History, The Sale of Creeds)
28. Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
Meditations
29. Galen (c. 130-200)
On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus (205-270)
The Enneads
32. St. Augustine (354-430)
Works
(esp. On the Teacher, Confessions, City of God, On Christian Doctrine)
33. The Song of Roland (12th century?)
34. The Nibelungenlied (13th century?)
(Völsunga Saga is the Scandinavian version of the same legend)
35. The Saga of Burnt Njal
36. St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274)
Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
Works
(esp. The New Life, On Monarchy, The Divine Comedy)
38. Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400)
Works
(esp. Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales)
39. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)
The Prince
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus (c.1
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
"[C]an't hide their impatience with the fuzziness of liberal arts"? I don't get it. What does this de-fuzz? The selection process? Someone else has made the fuzzy choices, but there's still no Classicometer that you point at a book to decide if it's worth reading. And if you're so impatient with the arts, what are you doing reading literature -- skimming the filler in Moby Dick to get to the juicy technical details of whaling?
Bah. The only thing that's simplified and streamlined here is the process of buying a whole bunch of stuff. Has consumerism reached such grim intensity that it's no longer more fun to browse and shop for yourself?
Mind the Gap
I work for another subsidiary of Penguin's parent company, Pearson.. I wonder if I can get a discount on that..... Of course, it would make up for my apartment having no furniture.
Not to mention that many of the Russian works (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin) in Gutenberg are poor translations.
a Library that has many people with many interests...
I have read the entire list
(of titles that is).
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Lovecraft, but no Tolkien, no Heinlein, no Azimov,
where's Kant? Where are Gauss, Riemann, etc?
Classics for those who imagine that somehow the modern world could be sustained for a week without science and math and all that follow from them. Baloney.
From dictionay.com: USAGE NOTE Enormity is frequently used to refer simply to the property of being great in size or extent, but many would prefer that enormousness (or a synonym such as immensity) be used for this general sense and that enormity be limited to situations that demand a negative moral judgment, as in Not until the war ended and journalists were able to enter Cambodia did the world really become aware of the enormity of Pol Pot's oppression. Fifty-nine percent of the Usage Panel rejects the use of enormity as a synonym for immensity in the sentence At that point the engineers sat down to design an entirely new viaduct, apparently undaunted by the enormity of their task. This distinction between enormity and enormousness has not always existed historically, but nowadays many observe it. Writers who ignore the distinction, as in the enormity of the President's election victory or the enormity of her inheritance, may find that their words have cast unintended aspersions or evoked unexpected laughter.
the shipping on that is only $3.99, not to shabby.
19 titles by Graham Green. Sounds nice. But missing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn? Incomplete.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
The list contains:
# Beowulf by Anonymous
# Beowulf: A Prose Translation by Anonymous
# Beowulf: A Verse Translation by Anonymous
Which, as we all recognize, is a Beowulf cluster....
"Special Shipping Information: This item is not eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping. See details."
Gee, ya think?
at least I don't have to rummage the site looking for one more title to push it into free Super Saver shipping status...
anyone looking to buy this should probably sign up for the A9.com dealio so they can save 1.57% (aka $125). This drops the price to a mere $7864
digital artist, 3D animator, web designer, and otherwise technological creative type....
If you want the world's population to seem unbelievably huge, too big to ever deal with, make all the people join hands in a line.
If you want to make the defecit seem smaller, describe it as paper money in dumpsters. As a volume it won't seem nearly as daunting than it would all stacked up, let alone end to end.
Both are correct, but they lead the reader's impression in a way that's intentional.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The translations suck horribly because Gutenberg has to rely on public domain versions. Since translations are copyrightable, the translation must have been written pre-1923, which kinda cuts down on the available material.
Petition your congresscritter for a saner copyright term if you want Gutenberg to have access to newer, better translations.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Unpossible
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Who would buy 828 feet worth of books, for nearly $8,000, that would take 20 years to read at the rate of one title per week?
Someone who values literature. This may be difficult for some of you to understand, but such people do exist.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
As someone who got their degree in English and spent a lot of time hanging around Humanities professors, I always found their candid opinions of "classics" amusing. My favorite quote (which was probably quoted from someone else) was from a British literature professor I had: "The classics are the books we all pretend to have read."
This type of thing is common in all fields, where many of the people who've ACTUALLY done the studying in depth treat the "legends" and "classics" in the field with a little less reverence than those outside the field.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
The complete Criterian Colection $4,999
I'm not a Christian, but I find it very telling that The Koran is listed but The Bible is not.
This link doesn't sponsor the wall street journal.
Please login to access my lawn
I wouldn't buy my books in bulk by publisher. When I choose a book it's by way of research into the author(s)' background. By way of example, many history books from the 50s and 60s that I've picked up have a strong bias as the authors were promulgating their theory as either pro marxist or antimarxist. I'd no idea that much of the soft sciences were a battle ground for Marxists ideologues. Who's to say what biases the publisher may express throughout the collection and why limit yourself to the exegencies of one publishing house in a search for knowledge.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
a short copyright would NOT cause civilisation to collapse?!?!
"Massive massive editing errors"? Holy shit! Can you point out one of these massive massive errors?
Or are you possibly referring to errors which were in the original text, which the Project explicitly refuses to correct, since their stated goal is to preserve the original author's intent, even if that original author couldn't spell?
The "bizzare [sic] formatting system" Gutenberg uses is Plain Vanilla ASCII for a reason---longetivity. They say it better than I could; read their rationale. They're more interested in making the text stable for the long term, than in compiling it for your device-of-the-week. Besides, as other users have pointed out, you can, with little to moderate effort, derive your proprietary format from the ASCII plaintext.
Not to mention that Gutenberg provides some titles in RTF format. Or HTML, including formatting, illustration, and so on. Or that they have a whole section about reading their eBooks on PDAs.
When was the last time you used PG? 1985? They have over 16,000 etexts, with more being added every day---how is this falling "far short"? What great and towering public-domain works does their catalog lack?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Considering these are all 'classics' and not new releases, ~7.39 a book isn't that cheap, you'd probably pay less in Barnes and Noble. The fact that the original price was ~$12.24 a book is outrageous.
So although the collected works of Jane Austen were on my reading list one year, I read none of them and focused on DH Lawrence, Faulkner, etc.
Good choice.
I've read three Jane Austen novels. Two of them were a complete waste of time, since they were all the same story with different characters. Well, different names. Or should I say "character", since apart from the female protagonist there weren't any. I've been told that one Jane Austen or Emily Bronte novel would satisfy my lifetime requirement for that genre, and I can believe it.
This is too funny... the whole point of buying these books would be to have a list of them so I can read one that sounds interesting when I wanted to pick up a new book. But now I can just look at the list and buy as I go.
Don't use it to describe the books, unless you really, really hate them.
ENORMITY
NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. enormities
1. The quality of passing all moral bounds; excessive wickedness or outrageousness. 2. A monstrous offense or evil; an outrage.
Don't worry! I can cure you of that opinion!!!
Just read _Les Miserables_, the entire, five volume, unabridged version. That will cure you of that silly "wait, it might get better" notion! You'll appreciate editors more, too!
Highlights you'll encounter will include:
Les Miserables had some very good writing in it, but excavating it is like digging through a tapped out gold mine. It's ultimately just not that profitable: and this from a work that is nominally "a great classic".
After reading that thing, I say, don't worry about "doing an injustice to the author". By allowing yourself to wade through a sea of literary detrius, you're only doing an injustice to yourself.
--
AC
The most important thing is not to HAVE all these books (althought it's fine).
Far more important is to actually USE any of them to learn more about human functioning and to contribute more efficiently to improving oneself and the rest of humanity.
There is certainly a very valuable treasure of human experience in such a collection -- and a lot of garbage, too (which can also be instructive -- by contrast). What I would love to see, is an HONEST and neutral compilation of human ideas. It's not necessary to read ALL this paper in order to get the most important things and start to do something.
Of course, some will say, read the Bible then. Others will prefer the Coran, or Tao Te King, or The Revelation of Arès. Fine, these are important fundamental works indeed which should be read and acted upon. But once you know the spiritual foundation of man, knowing human ideas and history is useful, too, in order to know more and act more efficiently in this mankind for the common good.
and I'm aware that translations, and "editions" (i.e. add a foreword by a well-known author of today) are copyrightable. Anyone wanting to read Gutenberg's translated works though should be aware that they're reading flawed writing.
Go on. Join.
I'm surprised the nitpicking failed to link to this...
Those who complain about affect & effect on
For classics, I prefer Everyman's Library. They're hardcovers and contain a usually very interesting introduction and a timeline of the author's life along with important events in literature and history. The latter alone is worth the time to pick these up a library.
GRRR. Pet bug.
'Enormity' means huge *evil*, not just huge. (definition) 'Enormousness' may sound like a mistake but it's actually correct.
On the other hand, possibly it *is* a horribly evil offer. When you buy it, it... eats up all of your free time! In a truly evil manner!
...or something.
Man. Library Science students everywhere must be shaking like junkies desparate for fix as they read this.
Flatland (complete text) by Edwin A. Abbott
It's a work of fiction written in 1884 about a 3-dimensional being's visit to a 2-dimensional world. It blew my mind when I first read it in high school.
And this happens right when they're trying to liquidate old copies of the Penguin Classics with the old covers to clear out warehouse space? :) Reminds me of grab-bags of anything - there may be one or two good books in it, but you have to buy a whole lot of crud. I'll stick to a-la-carte. BTW, Buy.com sells Penguin Classics dirt cheap.
It is still trolling.
If I wanted to start a small library, or add a humanities section to a company technical library, this is a great way to do it.
Except...
It's way overpriced.
Public domain books can be had for a lot less.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Newton's Principia Mathematica is now in PGDP in the original Latin. The Descent of Man and The Origin of Species . I'm kinda surprised that Euclid's not in there at all. Maybe a dearth of old translations?
Too bad there's not much SF in there, either. An unfortunate consequence of it being a relatively recent genre. Stupid copyright terms.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
These are paperbacks, are they not? The neat thing to do would be to assemble a collection of nicely hardbound versions of these--not firsts, but nicely bound--that would look a lot more impressive lining your library than a bunch of cheap paperbacks.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
The most entertaining part (IMO) of this article was a little snippet at the end, called "SPAM OF THE WEEK":
SPAM OF THE WEEK: We love spams that leave us with absolutely no idea what we're supposed to do. Like the one that came to the Real Time box last month from the sender Van Announcement. Its subject was "Drinks?" and the message body was "Happy hour @ 6:00 @ Jake's". And that was it -- no date, no embedded gif, no link, nothing. Was something missing? Was this some code we weren't cool enough to decipher? Perhaps it's just the grim possibility that we missed free booze, but we'd still like to know.
Listen, you don't buy the entire collection to read. You buy it to impress others if you are vain. You put the books on your bookshelf so that guests to your house think you are cultured and well educated. I'll bet that Amazon already has people interested in it.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
I want the Cliff's Notes for each one- *then* I'll consider it!
"Who would buy 828 feet worth of books, for nearly $8,000, that would take 20 years to read at the rate of one title per week?"
Probably not just a who, but several of them. I guess I can see one person ordering all this for his or her personal library, but I'm bettering it's probably geared more toward organizations and such.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
According to checkout info, shipping is only $3.99 (sounds like a bargain to me!)
The paperpack factor would keep these out of just about any library except for that of a Public Elementary School. And then, a better deal could be had on better quality books.
Would you pay as much for a Kia for a giant pile of paperbacks?
If they did something amazing like offer some sort of quality, leather binding, special edition, hell - even a cardboard cover, then I can see dropping nearly $8000 for books at one time.
Otherwise, I'd take my chances and perhaps miss out on 4 or 5 of those books by Anonymous and Shakespeare to bid on a few closed public library book lots. Might even get free bookshelves.
Even at $2 per book (high estimate) you'd come out ahead, unless you're one of those people who has to have all *brand new* stuff.
If the point is to have Emily Bronte on hand for all eternity, what's the sense of having her in a crappy airport paperback?
Sounds like the perfect thing for rich dorks who have acquired everything that can be acquired, except for taste.
Unfortunately all these books don't do any good if you don't read them. A prison convict with a 20-year-old paperback edition of Tolstoy has as much a chance at being well read as anyone else. That must be irritating to the millionaire who has exerted so much control over every other aspect of his life.
I've got a better idea. Let's encode the text of these thousands of books to standard ASCII. Then we'll put the entire text of these thousands of books on a blank 39 cent DVD ROM. And distribute them to our friends or list them on P2P networks.
Then we will have thousands of web sites where people from all over the world can talk and read about the individual titles. Were certain characters jerks, megamanics, fools, cowards, heroes, or just ordinary people caught in difficult circumstances.
Maybe people will get out their camcorders and make 'home movies' based on chapters or incidents of the books. Imagine 21st century movies, P2P distributed zero-budget 'productions' that use different actors for different chapters or sections of a book.
The centralized movie business from Hollywood appears to have peaked and seems to be entering a period of accelerating decline. Insanely expensive and tepid remakes of mediocre television shows specifically focused on a young audience that has little to reference its quality.
The greatest threat facing Hollywood is not that people will endless consume its product without paying, it's that people will stop thinking of Hollywood as a source of entertainment product at all. This threat is increased by the fact that the change will be invisible to Hollywood until it has developed an unstopable momentum. Hollywood may find its product repelling people in a manner similar to identical poles of magnets pushing away from each other.
Hollywood is about to find itself in the same position as the big four American auto makers did in the 1980s. Someone comes out of 'nowhere' and takes a big chunk of their market share. And nothing they can do will convince people to go back to their product.
These are probably printed as trade paperback
books. They're around 9 inches tall and hold
up much better than the standard mass market
aperback books which are around 6 inches. Don't
have any here at work to check, but thost sizes
are close.
Not to mention that if you bought them all separately, you'd get free "Super Saver" shipping. It's not a very good deal at all.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"By our count, if you weed out the multiple translations, different editions and compilations ("The Iliad" is there four times), as well as the "portable" volumes for well-represented authors, you wind up with 1,031 books"
W T F
1,031 books after dups and "goofy editions".
Amazon is charging the usual $3.99 for the entire order. That's a bargain all by itself, no? It ships within one and three weeks and will be fulfilled by Borders.
IIRC, one of the collections of "Great Books" Ii saw, justified leaving out the bible on the premise that nearly every American hous would have one. 'Course this was a set from the 50s, I believe. It probably wasn't terribly correct then.
Life span.
HTH.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Could this open some eyes and increase interest in alternative (Linux, Mac) offerings?
and save your 8k$
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 6A05RM/qid=1119886849/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/002-0001 810-6476837?v=glance&s=dvd&n=507846
241 titles on 282 discs!!!
Insane!!!
Too much: Loads of stuff prized by the self-anointed intellectual elite like James Joyce.
Good stuff: lots of true classics from ancient Rome and Greece.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
For this price, you could buy a very nice PDA like device or table PC, hit Gutenberg, they have many of these books, and a lot of other not in the collection. A nice little perl script to do formatting, and you have a much better collection, and a tablet PC to boot
I reject your reality
No free shipping? WTF? We all know they are going to send it media rate, and it'll arrive in 4 weeks water stained and beat up.
Seriously, if you're dropping that much cash on what's almost certainly a high margin item, they could at least pop for shipping.
Special Shipping Information: This item is not eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping. See details.
Well, no free shipping, forget them. I am not buying. I wish I would have known about this before I cleared out my condo...i hope I can get my couch back
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
The number of books you own increases as time passes.
The number of books you'll have time to read during the rest of your life decreases.
At some point in your life, these two lines cross.
Meaning there is a point in your life when after that, you won't live long enough to read all the books you have.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
If I was building a house (one day when I am older, and after I get married - but before i have kids) I would build a library. This would be a good way to stock your library with many titles. And it probably comes with some kind of digital list so you can sort it in your favorite database management program. Imagine that for a nice library. Honestly, I would get this if I was building a place.
Good job for Amazon marketing.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
There is at least one Enlish possessive pronoun that use an apostrophe. In particular "one's" as in "one's grammar is shite".
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I mean, come on
Donating a set to a small town library, or school, would be a great way to set up a legacy.
The "so and so" collection. If you need a tax write off, and want to be remembered, it is a way to go.
Well, I've only ever read two Gutenberg e-texts, but: The Gods of Pegana* is missing accents all over the place. In fact, I'm not sure if it even has a single one of the accents in it. And this isn't a case of the "author couldn't spell", unless you're suggesting that Dunsany didn't know how to spell the names he came up with.
/. doesn't allow HTML entity codes. The bastards!
Their version Fifty-One Tales (by the same author) replaces a passage using the Greek alphabet with a passage using the Latin alphabet. (It may still be in Greek, however as I don't know Greek, I can't tell. However, that's not the point, as the Greek alphabet was used for thematic reasons.)
Not massive massive, but in my opinion they're very detrimental.
* I'm also missing an accent here, but
This is a great idea. I would do it. I dont have that jing laying around right now, but if I did, I'd get one of those amazing $1300 chairs from that Relax The Back store, or this.
Who would buy 828 feet worth of books, for nearly $8,000, that would take 20 years to read at the rate of one title per week?
Er... perhaps a library?
One definition on a geocities page is usually a hint that the word was misspelled. Try Longevity instead.
for Inspector Gadget. He is the only one who would be able to read them fast enough.
For eight grand, give me 300 hardcovers and I would be much happier. Who wants a big-ass family library of paperbacks?
- 20,000 Leagues under the Sea
- Journey to the Center of the Earth
- Mysterious Island
Not to mention Invisible Man, Murder in the Rue Morgue, To Kill a Mockingbird, Roots, and more. I know they can't fit every classic into this collection but I think they could have sacrificed a few of Shakespeare's lesser known works for some more popular ones by other authors.Erik http://yakko.cs.wmich.edu/~rattles
Oooh, for anything non-English in origin, hundreds of feet of plodding, too-literal translations. Nothing like Don Quixote made unfunny, and Dante made unpoetic.
(Sorry, pet Penguin peeve.)
Holy crap, I've been living a lie. I wonder how many times I've used that word.
Thanks; now I'm going to have to remember to kick myself whenever I start saying "longetivity" instead of "longevity". If I don't keep an eye on myself, I'll be saying "irregardless" any day now.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It is a matter of economy of scale; these books are going for about two years worth of gasoline. If you read a book a day this offer will keep you going for nearly three years. If it is a book a week, then we are looking at 20 years, not taking in account any re-reading. Many people spend this amount of money and time over and over again on their library. One would not think a second time about buying a subscription to a magazine to save on individual issues; these are just books instead of magazines. In this day and age one has to think about their ROI (return on investment), and if you calculate the time that you can take to enjoy these books if is a fraction of what most entertainment costs today. I my self have quite a few Penguin Classics from back when they had the monochrome orange and white covers. I figured they may be valuable one day. Now I see the true value is in their being read. A small caution is that they do have not really duplicates but different versions or translations of some works as "The Iliad" by Homer has four different books: ISBN: 0140445927 ISBN: 0140275363 ISBN: 0140444440 ISBN: 0140447946
Fantasy Football
--pete
Copyright? Do you have any idea of what the subject is? Most of what Penguin publishes as been out of copyright for longer than they have been in business. They have no worry about things falling out of copyright, as their business model is taking books that are no copyrighted, and publishing them as cheaply as they can.
Darn it! http://amazon.ca/ isn't carrying it. Ah well, I guess I'll have to live without. :-)
Well, with the poor representation of SF, it won't sell very well to this crowd.
Many of these books aren't what I'd call classics anyway. But it's an interesting exercise in brute force marketing.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
At best they're scanning. Might be good enough to get you an understanding of a simple book (most fiction work). But there is nothing particularly enjoyable in doing so (in my opinion) and they definetely miss the subtleties of the stories.
Now I am probably going to get all kinds of replies saying that no, they indeed read and absorb every last word. Sorry, I don't believe it.
This one, yes? I can only assume that it was produced before Gutenberg started using alternate encodings for its texts. They're still not using Unicode, I don't think, which is why Greek gets transliterated (tau-epsilon-chi becomes "tekh" or something like that, for instance). A few books use Unicode, and many HTML versions use the HTML entity equivalents. Non-english text could, alas, be better. But it's a technical restriction---this is why Gutenberg proofs texts that are all or almost all in the Latin alphabet. It's not sloppiness; it's a technical limitation. I suppose when they get Unicode support running on PGDP, they'll redo some of these. I hope.
Slashdot does allow ISO 8859-1, though---ÿáý for àçcêñts, I suppose.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
How many Libraries of Congress is the Classics Collection?
[o]_O
Several people have referred to the Gutenberg archive of non-copyright books. Before OCR, a book-lover had to laboriously type in a volume. OCR still has errors which much corrected. Often an individual will "adopt" a favorite book like community in Fahrenheit-451.
As for me, I just got back from lunch reading the Penguin Classics edition of Les Miserables. It's well-bound and the typography, while dense, is easy on the eyes. Sure, the thing's a cinderblock, but it's still more pleasant to read with a book beside my plate than my Treo. And it's a lot easier to skip ahead to the appendices, or backwards to remind myself what Valjean actually did for the gardender at the convent.
ESCAPE POD - The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine
Especially because Newton's is archaically named: it's about physics. Russell and Whitehead were actually setting out to lay down the principles of mathematics.
The first definition is a deviation from the norm; abnormal, irregular. The second definition is the criminal one. The third is excessive size, but the usage is considered incorrect.
Note that "enormous" has basically the same definitions, and "enormity" (which came later) was influenced by the adjective version.
There's an amusing variety of these words: enorm, enormance, enormand, enormification, enormious, enormitan, enormity, enormly, enormous, enormously, enormousness.
Somthing is not right there... I usually put my books on the shelf side-by-side, not end-to-end. They take a lot less space that way.
lol
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
A good sentiment, but depending on the size of their collection they might just toss paperbacks, they are not durable enough. And odds on they already have many of these Penguin titles, which are generally "classics", in some other form. My local library just takes donated paperbacks and puts them in their "honor system" no-checkout-required rack or sells them at the flea market fundraiser.
I woudl call and ask - my library prefers a cash donation - libraries get deep discounts on new hardcover books, they can buy the books they have demand for, and sometiems the classics are available special beefed-up library editions.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Even with the "40% discount" this collection averages over $7.30 per book. Paperbacks of public-domain classics at several local bookstores run $2-$5.
For great justice.
something doesn't add up. 828 feet of books = $8000 of books? so say these books are all about $9.99 and so there are about 828 of them - does that mean that each book is on average a foot thick? as i look around my books I see very few books approaching 4 inches thick, let alone a full foot. there's a russian - english dictionary on the shelf that's about 25cm thick; almost a foot. so if the books are more normal penguin editions they are at most half an inch thick. that's more like 20,000 books. which is a complete bargain at $0.40 per book. and even if you don't read them all, they are a valuable resource for your descendants that will keep on entertaining when the oil is all gone.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
The really sad thing is not only have I not read any of these books, but most of them I've never even heard of...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What are you smoking?
Free Hans!
Might be a mistake, but...
Amazon Prime Member
Items: $7,989.99
Shipping & Handling: $3.99
Total Before Tax: $7,993.98
Estimated Tax: $0.00
Order Total: $7,993.98
get nemulator
Apparently it's only $3.99!
Those books often are in the public domain only because their copyright has expired; back when they were created, they were created by experts. And there is no reason why a 19th century translation, commentary, or piece of literature should not still be the definitive version.
So, how much would it cost to get the all of the classics as Dover Thrifts???
They must think i'm rich or something.
If any kind soul wants to saddle me with these books, I really wouldn't mind.
I drank what? -- Socrates
You could save $30 off this item when you get a new Amazon Visa® Card.
That's the key. Now I can afford it!
No, wait, still can't...
It is a pretty neat collection of books, though. Not neat enough that I'd finance a book purchase, however.
Yes. It's annoying isn't it?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I got my Van Dorens mixed up. Easy enough to do... both Charles' father Mark Van Doren and his uncle Carl Van Doren were Pulitzer-prize winning author, and respected thinkers in their time. Charles, Mark and Carl were all graduates of, and later professors at, Columbia University.
No smokes here, officer.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
I have at various times of my life read at least one book per day, sometimes more. On a good day an 800 page book is just manageable between an early rise and a late bedtime.
I have read the complete chronicles of narnia in one sitting.
That's easy...
Free Shipping On All Orders Over $25 From Amazon.com
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Why is the parent poster flaming himself? Is this some Slashdot trick to get double karma with a Funny mod the first time and Informative the second?
just downloaded via your favorite P2P network! :)
Ah right, it's the "natural philosophy" that's archaic, but the the "mathematical principles" makes sense in context.
Honestly people, whay some of you do to your eyes is to beg disbelief.
Ask your optician or ophtalmologists what do they think about this little screen of yours....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And here I was imgining that the English system of measures was complicated and irrational!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
38. Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra, 1547-1616. Don Quixote.
Part Three
39. William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. Complete Works.
That tells me all what I need to know about this list.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.