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.'"

Comments

Quick Script + Gutenberg?

[Angry Toad]

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?

Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Pretty impressive...

[Skater]

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.

Fuzziness?

[sielwolf]

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.

Re:Fuzziness?

[jacobito]

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.

Do the math...

[egburr]

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.

Survey Says...59% of scholars agree with you,

[caveat]

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

Re:Might still be a good choice for a new library

[hotspotbloc]

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've got a better idea...

[Simonetta]

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.

Re:E-book

[Anonymous Coward]

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.