LITTLE BY LITTLE
There are now three of my books digitized and available on Amazon.com for $9.99 each. If anyone finds this too steep a price, just send me an email and I will send you a check for the amount. The three books are The Poverty of Liberalism, Understanding Rawls, and Understanding Marx. More to come.
You might want to point out that anyone who has an Amazon Prime account can borrow the books (one at a time) for free.
ReplyDeleteBorrow???!!! You mean just read it and return it, like a library? Good grief, man, how could anyone not want to have one of my books in their personal collection forever??? :)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, good point.
I own two paper copies of your Ten Great Works of Philosophy, and I think they're wonderful paperbacks.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, down with the fascism of electronic texts! I own both a kindle and a nook and they are way inferior to a paperback book.
However, you will probably hear that old math trick: before you could carry only ten books in your hands, now you can carry over ten thousand books.
I'm angry since anyone can predict the demise of the paperback soon because there is such a cost effective profit from producing just electronic texts. I believe it's because no printing, shipping and handling are required.
I have very powerful sensuous feelings about certain books. The sturdy old Oxford English Translation of the Works of Aristotle that I bought, one at a time, second-hand, when I was a student, with their off-white pages, slightly nubbly; The stubby square Selby-Bigge edition of Hume's Treatise, with the fabulous index by Selby-Bigge, a work of scholarship in itself; the large paper-back copy of Georges Lefebvre's La Revolution Francaise; the multi-volume East German edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels, with the namenregister identifying Napoeleon as a bourgeois general. When I go looking for a book on my shelf, even if I have not read it in forty years, like as not I can recall what it looks like. The only book I have ever managed to read on a computer screen was The Count of Monte Cristo, which I downloaded onto my IPad and took with me on the endless trip to South Africa. Reading it on a screen was a weird and unsatisfying experience.
ReplyDeleteI've left behind more books than clothes in the many places I've lived--sold some, and left others with friends. If I had all the books I've ever owned I'd have five or ten times more in my possession than I do now. I've left books with friends and family in Vienna, Bratislava, and El Paso. And it is, really, as though I'd been cut up and parts of me left in boxes. I often think I'd like to look something up in a book, or cite a passage from a book, only to realize that I no longer own the book or that it now sits in a house thousands of miles away. Saddest of all to see that books I once owned have either gone out of print or have doubled or tripled in price. Sad to think I'll never buy a particular book again, that I could once own it, read it, write in it, watch it age--and then let it go, and never be able to buy it again....
ReplyDeleteBut good for you if you're making your books available. Would that many others would follow your example.
One of the things I love, now that I am ancient, is to look at books I have owned for a very long time and read my marginal notes, some of which are quite long. I have already remarked on this blog that in my very first copy of Kant's CRITIQUE, now rebound and virtually unusable, there are passages in which first, in one ink, I have written a puzzled question mark; then in a second ink, I have written, "Oh yes, I see." And now, I no longer know either what the original question was or what the answer was!
ReplyDeleteProf.
ReplyDeleteI tend to be more methodical and careful in my handwritten margin notes.
My only problem is deciphering my own handwriting...