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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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Ah, Texans.
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....
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
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.