Sponsord Links:
Curious to if there were any other cheaps books I would like, I searched for “Dover Thrift Editions” The search yealded 418 books, most of which are between $1 and $3.50!
Most of the books are of the sort that you read (or were supposed to read) in high school, and the only reason they’re so cheap is because they’re past their copyright period. Still, I think I’m going to get myself a copy of a few of them because for just a couple dollars, you can’t go wrong.
Considering that most of the paperback novels I buy for class are $10-15 apiece, Thrift Editions are great. They have a lot of small poetry and play volumes too, so I’ll buy some of those when I study for my Masters exam this summer.
They’re not used in an academic setting much, though, because they’re not edited very well (if at all). Translations tend to be very old (again, copyright expiration), there’s no bibliography or annotations, and of course no scholarly essays. But if they made the cover designs prettier, you’d be damn sure I’d have a library full of ‘em.
The whole “affordable editions of classics” trend is getting major buzz in the book business, btw. Barnes and Noble’s in-house “Classics” line is rapidly expanding, and publishers are realizing that classics attract pretentious yuppies. I guess this is good…
And yet Congress passes retarded laws like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act that (retroactively) extends copyright to life plus 70 years (and even longer for corporate authored works). Some ridiculously large percentage of works are completely out-of-print before their copyright expires. Ugh.