My Christmas present this year is an Amazon Kindle. I'm planning to use it a lot for reading pdfs from JSTOR and the like (as well as the handy pdfs of OCTs and Teubners you can get from archive.org). But is there anything else I really must have on it? Amazon.co.uk have some free philosophy editions - Hume's enquiries, for example - but I can't always tell whether the translations of, say, Plato and Aristotle are any good. I did buy Jowett's complete Plato for 72p, because I'm a real risk-taker like that. But are there any other bargains I should know about?
2 comments:
The sample option is the way to go, even with free stuff. Then you can see whether it's been done OK or not. It's especially important for anything at all complex, like poetry. I got a badly-OCR'd copy of the Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate off of amazon for a cheap price, and it turned out that they'd incorporated all the marginal digs at Protestants into the main text, which isn't just bad book production but actually morally wrong. Amazon are good at refunding money if there's something wrong with a kindle book. But go first to sites like project gutenberg.
I've got one coming my way sometime in January (7 weeks to Australia - is it swimming here?). I wondered a bit about the pdf reading, as the reviews of the kindle pdf software didn't seem effusive. I've been playing around in the kindle store looking for older Gk lit and I can see that it is going to be necessary to send myself a sample of almost anything to identify the editor before going any further. Mind you, I'm mostly going to read novels... Vicki
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