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.'"
So how many have you read on the list?
Complete list here.
I think you are both right. It can mean both very large and vast, or very wicked.
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
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...
If you read and clicked through the article....
:-O
You would see at
http://tinyurl.com/bfj8v
"Approximately 700 pounds in weight, the titles would tower 828 feet if you stacked them atop each other--almost as tall as the Empire State Building."
This means end to end, rather than back to back.
So, the maths are correct. Your interpretation is wrong..!
After Penguin's involvement in the whole "katie.com" fiasco, I try to avoid buying anything with their name on it (Linux excepted!)
In the meantime, check the item out on Amazon here.
Wait, it says "Amazon.com Exclusive!!!" You mean I can't pick one up at my local Barnes&Noble?
While waiting, how about having a look at Project Gutenberg, I'm sure you'll find most of them there.
9 19344
See also: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=154018&cid=12
Then go to Manybooks.net and pick a different format. They have the Gutenberg collection, but in a wide variety of formats. I personally use the iSolo format for my palm pilot (a T3 with the wide screen which means I get a full page of book text per screen), and I rarely have formatting issues. In fact, books are a pleasure to read.
Please....
Gutenberg texts are formatted the way they are for lots of quite good reasons, which you have even figured out for yourself...
As for breaking pocket devices, what are you doing with them. They are text files!!
To make it look adequate on a Palm:
1. Download etext
2. Run through gut.pl (http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/gut/) - followed by deleting the legal stuff if you like
3. Convert to Plucker / iSilo or whatever you like
4. Read
I have read some great stuff this way and have not had trouble breaking my palm.
Um BTW, as an English Major, and if you would like to pass, try leaving the apostrophe out of "it's" (... I was hoping to get modded karma-whore-informative but am now assuming that grammar-nazi-troll is more likely!)
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
Penguin is note just reprinting the originals. Many of these are new translations or new editions. Though editing a classic might seem like sacrilege, it is something that has been done to most of them and often there is no definite canonical edition. The books also include introductions and notes. I am not disputing that they might have pretty good margins on some of these, but they do have costs other than printing.
Funny, my *hardcover* "The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare", which says "All 37 Plays, All 160 Sonnets" and comes to 1024 pages only cost me $13 at Barnes and Noble. Classics are cheap. Paying $40 for a paperback version of this would be insane.
I'm repeating something I wrote in another thread here, but you pay extra for quality editing, introductions, explanatory notes etc.
Over here there is a discount brand of paperbacks called "Wordsworth Classics". £1.50 each on Amazon. I used to get them for £1 each in discount bookshops. What you get is the text dumped onto paper (sometimes there are out-of-copyright illustrations too : Alice in Wonderland for example).
What you don't get is footnotes, a few thousand words about the author and the background to the book, etc., and sometimes that's worth having.
Go to amazon.com and paste "Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection" into the "Search: Amazon.com" box. Click on the first hit and when the page loads, note the URL.
For those of you who won't try this, the URL you get is the one that I pasted. I have no affiliation with Amazon.
BTW, I would be going for iPod accessories, not a graphics card.
Because Penguin mostly prints stuff that is out of copyright.
The Penguin Classics imprint largely consists of out of copyright works, but Penguin Books publishes a lot of contemporary literature.
Back in the day, the had Penguin for fiction, Pelican for non-fiction and Puffin for "younger readers". I get the impression those brands have been phased out, which is a shame because I thought it was rather clever, and the logos were nice.
Penguin is probably most famous for fighting and winning the Lady Chatterly's Lover censorship case.
If you read and clicked through the article.... You would see at
And if you read the preceeding sentence, you would see: "laid end to end they would hit the 52-mile mark". So yes, the 828' figure means stacked cover-to-cover, aka linear feet of shelf space using the most natural way to shelve a book.
Of course, I'll agree, the math still seems VERY off... 1082 titles end-to-end measuring 52 miles would require books 253'9" tall... I've seen some oversized art books before, but nothing like that!
I also have a problem with the price...
"Penguin Classics" refers to those ultra-cheap paperbacks you get for $0.99 to $2.99 on end caps at Barnes & Noble, correct? That comes out the around $3k, at most...
Overall, I'd have to say I suspect this as a joke. Can't say I "get" it, but the description contains such wild inaccuracies, I just can't believe this represents a real product.
"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
This really sucks, primarly as I could not be bothered to throw together a html parser, so select all in Firefox on the Collection by Title page, and paste it into a text file called test.txt
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
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.
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.
Exactly.
Here's a usage note from Dictionary.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.
It's rather depressing that someone from the Wall Street Journal doesn't make the distinction.
Insert witty sig here.
They still do. (pops)
And from all of their locations. Shipped even.
Possessive pronouns do not use apostrophes.
"It" is a pronoun, the possessive of "it" is a new word: "its." The confusion exists because of the contraction "it's" which is simply "it is" shortened through the use of an apostrophe.
Other examples:
He - His
She - Hers
You - Yours
Me - Mine
It - Its
You wouldn't say "The cat licked he's fur." or "I liked you's fur."
The same goes for "it."
What?
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!!!
The problem with Project Gutenberg is that it has to rely upon public domain translations, which aren't necessarily the best and rarely include substantial notes.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Yes, this is true. Both are just ordinary Amazon.com links.
The problem is that many people see the, qid or ref and erroneously jump to the conclusion that it's an affiliate link. Amazon has many different types of URLs, so I can see how this is possible (i.e. look at the URL in the article).
One thing people can do to nip this in the bud is to crop links after the product code, like this: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0147 502683
That way, the trolls will get modded down instantly with no confusion from anyone else, because there's no way, that that link has an affiliate in it.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.