Score One for Kindle

I finally decided that my next course on Academic Earth will be The Poetry of John Milton, by a Yale professor named John Rogers.  I have had Paradise Lost on my shelf since I graduated college, but when I would wander over to pick my next read, it never seemed like reading it myself would be any fun.  Each time I looked at it, I wanted Dave Mullaly, AP English Teacher Extraordinaire, to teach it to me.

The textbook is a simple "complete works" that retails for $50.  I figured I would take the nice Borders gift card my Dad gave me and buy it off the website.  Borders.com doesn't even list it in inventory.

Spending $50 of my own money on this book is not acceptable.  The online used book stores only drop the price down to $40 or so before shipping.  So I started asking myself if I really need it.  I only really wanted to read Paradise Lost.  I hadn't planned on reading every assigned piece of material.  I just thought that being able to follow the lectures with the text in front of me would be cool.  Then I thought of the Kindle.

Kindle has tons of out-of-copyright material priced around a dollar, and sure enough, there was a Complete Works of Poetry from John Milton.  Done and downloaded. 

It is obviously not the same thing.  In fact, from the Table of Contents, I am having a great deal of trouble matching up titles of poems to those listed in the Syllabus.  And the poems do not have line numbers listed, so it was a bit hard following the professor exactly through the first one.  But for $.99 I can certainly deal.

God Bless the Internet.