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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!
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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.
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?
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.
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.
$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
I take it you don't have kids? My reading rate dropped by an order of magnitude once that happened. Now I grab whatever time I can.
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!
# 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.
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?
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)
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.
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
Okay okay, we get it, you can read super fast, give us a break. May be you should learn the value of a "leisurely pace".
Man, slashdot isn't the place to find humility, thats for damn sure.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Just sayin', it isn't unthinkable for an institution to purchase something like this.
Finding God in a Dog
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid by Virgil
It's a good thing they've got three copies of the Aeneid by Virgil. I'd hate to have only read two of them and missed out on what happens in the third.
Looks kind of like the selections of ready-made web templates you get for $30.00. 250,000 web-sites my foot.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
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
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.
You fool! A review clearly indicates:
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
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
That's what the Easton Press is for. Examples:
Shakespeare
Tolkien
Asimov's Robot Series
Science Classics
Churchill's World War I History
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
I have read the entire list
(of titles that is).
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Principia Mathematica - Russell & Whitehead
Relativity - Einstein
Origin of Species - Darwin
Necronomicon - Abdul Alhazred
OK, all but the last one.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
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....
But how many footballs fields is that?
And what does 1082 books equal measured in Libraries of Congress?
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
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.
"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
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.
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.
Aha, Wikipedia to the rescue!
"Today, the copyright of all editions of Mein Kampf except the English and the Dutch (Dutch government seized that in the same way) is owned by the state of Bavaria. The copyright will end on December 31, 2015."
"The government of Bavaria, in agreement with the federal government of Germany, does not allow any copying or printing of the book in Germany, and opposes it also in other countries but with less success. Owning and buying the book is legal. Trading in old copies is legal as well, unless it is done in such a fashion as to promote hatred or war, which is generally illegal. Most German libraries carry heavily commented and excerpted versions of Mein Kampf."
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 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."
I mean, come on
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.
So, how much would it cost to get the all of the classics as Dover Thrifts???