Slashdot | 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.'”
As a book freak, I am droolin’. As the person who keeps track of our alleged budget, I am laughing my ass off.
The first dozen or so authors:
- Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
- The Letters of Abelard and Heloise by Peter Abelard
- The Letters of John and Abigail Adams by Abigail Adams and John Adams
- Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams
- The Portable John Adams by John Adams
- The Life of St. Columba by Adomnan of Iona
- The Oresteian Trilogy by Aeschylus
- The Complete Fables by Aesop
- Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova
- Le Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier
- On Painting by Leon Battista Alberti
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward by Horatio Alger Jr.
- The Divine Comedy Volume I: Inferno by Dante Alighieri
- Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
- Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand
- Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
- Alfred the Great by Anonymous