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Amazon's 1,082-volume Classics Collection: $7,989

Posted by timothy on from the cheap-at-the-price dept.

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.'"

22 of 605 comments (clear)

  1. Quick Script + Gutenberg? by Angry+Toad · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Quick Script + Gutenberg? by Deliveranc3 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Um as an English Major I must warn you Gutenberg sucks.

      It has massive massive editing errors and it really needs a certain level of accountability, not to mention the messages at the beginnning make it really sucky to read on a palm pilot.

      They used some bizzare formatting system which breaks it on most pocket devices, they decided not to use rtf or anything else with support for graphics (Corectly assuming that those were usually patented but still) the list just goes on and on.

      It could have been an excellent service but it falls just short.

      It's catalogue falls far short.

  2. Re:Libraries by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    You jest, but, I kid you not, our CEO has a habit of buying out small libraries and bookstores in search of rare books.

  3. Needed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Dont forget The Criterion Collection Gift Set! by shakey_deal · · Score: 2, Interesting
    # The Criterion Collection Holiday 2004 Gift Set consists of all of their published DVDs through October 2004 (except for the out-of-print editions): that's 241 titles on 282 discs and includes a Certificate of Authenticity

    # 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!

  5. Pretty impressive... by Skater · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Pretty impressive... by Skater · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes, but no DRM. ;)

      I think the real idea is that they don't want to sell it. But if someone does cough up the cash, then they'll sell it and retire. :)

      It's not the acquisition cost - it's the acquisition time. There's another page on the site that says they searched for decades to finish one complete set. Sure, you can probably put one together, but it won't be easy, especially for those songs that hit #40 on the chart for 1 week in 1958 or something.

  6. Fuzziness? by sielwolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?
    1. Re:Fuzziness? by jacobito · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

      I could add my own roster of missing authors: Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, H.D., Ezra Pound, Flann O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, Felipe Alfau, Samuel Beckett, and so on. The most likely answer to most of these complaints is that Penguin doesn't have the rights to many 20th-century and contemporary titles. So DeLillo, Eugenides, Ellis, Eggers, and Murakami are obviously out -- they're not published by Penguin, to my knowledge. And while I don't specifically know the copyright situation of Kafka's oeuvre, a glance at a bookstore shelf certainly gives the impression that Schocken holds the publishing rights to The Trial and The Castle while seemingly anybody can publish a translation of the short stories.

      On the other hand, I have an old Penguin collection of Sylvia Ocampo stories, and I could have sworn that Penguin had an edition of Martin Fiero, so your complaint about South America rings true. I suspect, though, that Penguin doesn't hold rights to publish that other giant of South American literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and this is probably also true for Adolfo Bioy Casare, Julio Cortázar, and the many worthy South American writers that I've never heard of. And then there's the fact that South American writers in general simply aren't well-known or welll-read in the English-speaking world -- most of Borges's books aren't even in print in the United States!

      I don't know what the excuse is for Rushdie, either, except that Penguin publishes Midnight's Children, Haroun, etc. under its Penguin Contemporaries imprint, not its Penguin Classics line. But yeah, if Pynchon and Barthelme make the Penguin Classics cut, I don't see why Rushdie doesn't -- it does seem arbitrary.

      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.

      And Li Po and Basho and Confucius and Cao Xueqin and Shen Fu and Murasaki Shikibu... but your criticism still stands. I think it's fair to say that the non-Western titles here are included because of the impact they've made upon the Western literary tradition.

  7. Re:828ft by ThosLives · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You can get 828 feet if you lay them all flat. (That'd only be about .75 feet per book, which is 9 inches - a little tall for a book but not unreasonable). I don't know why'd you do this, other than to use facts to show that you can take up lots of space with your books.

    --
    "There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
  8. Do the math... by egburr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  9. Survey Says...59% of scholars agree with you, by caveat · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.


    ref
    --

    Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
  10. Books by the Yard by IPFreely · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Many years ago, one of my friends worked in a used book store (Half Price Books, in north Texas). They bought and sold lots of used books.

    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.
  11. Re:i'm kind of a big deal by kiwimate · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's what the Easton Press is for. Examples:

    Shakespeare
    Tolkien
    Asimov's Robot Series
    Science Classics
    Churchill's World War I History

  12. Re:E-book by Shads · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Ebooks rule, but they just don't have the *FEEL* of paper books. I like to read ebooks to get a feel for if I would like to own the book, if I enjoy the ebook I buy the real thing. It has probally saved me *almost* enough money to buy that nice little book collection :P There are *alot* of really bad sci-fi and fantasy out there.

    Hmm lets see, at the rate I read (which is about 150-300 pages an hour (depends on difficulity of the material to gain comprehension) or 3-6 pages a minute... figure the average book is ~450 pages long and there are ~1100 books roughly... a reading time of ~4 hours a day (I've maintained that for about 10 years consistantly.) That's about ~500,000 pages... at 600-1200 pages a day it would take me between ~420 and ~835 days to finish reading the entire collection. If you figure the price at $10 per day it's really not that much... pity you can't get it on a payment plan :)

    --
    Shadus
  13. Re:Thank god... by PhilipDC78 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually, I added the massive item to my shopping cart at Amazon and went part way through the checkout, and the listed shipping price was a mere $3.99. So, why do we need Amazon Prime again? Every time I order from Amazon, I make sure my total is over $25 and get free shipping anyway.

  14. Humanities Professor Quote by LetterJ · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  15. Re:Might still be a good choice for a new library by hotspotbloc · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I was thinking the same thing. Here in New England there are tons of tiny libraries. Most of them were started in the 1800's and are run by private people that have little or no outside funding. This package could be a big boast to them and might help save a local landmark.

    As for a gift for a school, most definitely ask first. Local politics run deep in local schools.

    About school politics, I once worked for a group that provided Internet access to all k-12 schools in the state (a small western state). Our head engineer (a really smart guy) had a daughter going to a high school with lots of equipment that hadn't been setup. We're talking over 100 PCs, networking gear, Cisco routers and a T1 that was being paid for but not used (termed at the NIU) for over two years. Our group would normally charge $85 per man hour to set everything up but we (about 12 people) volunteered to go in on a Saturday and do it for free. The school district computer administrator said no and that he would do it himself. Two years later nothing had been done. Over 100 brand new, unused four year old PCs still sat in their boxes.

    --
    "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
  16. I've got a better idea... by Simonetta · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  17. Re:E-book by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm not sure what the big deal with referral links is anyway. It doesn't cost me any extra to purchase with a non-referral link vs. with a referral link. The difference is in one case, Amazon.com, a company we're supposed to dislike because of software patents, gets a few hundred extra dollars off the sale. In the other case, Amazon.com gets less money and some fellow Slashdotter just like you gets a nice bonus instead. Yet, Slashdot group think favors the first option.

  18. The collection is very tempting... by Fantasy+Football · · Score: 0, Interesting

    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
  19. Dover Thrifts by zentinal · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So, how much would it cost to get the all of the classics as Dover Thrifts???