William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying

in Audio Books, Literature | April 5th, 2010

William Faulkn­er’s As I Lay Dying is wide­ly con­sid­ered one of the great Amer­i­can nov­els. Quite an accom­plish­ment, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing that Faulkn­er wrote the nov­el in six weeks while work­ing at a pow­er plant in 1929–30. Read more about his day jobs here.

Thanks to Harper­Collins, you can now lis­ten to Faulkn­er, him­self, read­ing from his mas­ter­piece: .au file (4.4 Mb), .gsm file (0.9 Mb), .ra file (0.5 Mb). The audio can be a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to make out at times. But you can read right along with the text in Google Books. Enjoy. Thanks MS.

For more audio clas­sics, check out our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 13 ) |

The Future of the Textbook: A Quick Glimpse

in e-books, Education | April 5th, 2010

Ama­zon ran a not so suc­cess­ful etext­book exper­i­ment at Prince­ton this year. Now it’s time for the iPad to take a crack at the dig­i­tal text­book mar­ket. Wast­ing lit­tle time, Cours­eS­mart has announced an iPad app that will bring thou­sands of text­books to Apple’s new plat­form. The video above gives you a glimpse into this ini­tia­tive. And while you can only tell so much from a short video, it looks like this prod­uct could have some legs. The inter­face looks pret­ty slick, and the prod­uct quite usable. The down­side is that Cours­eS­mart does­n’t do enough to low­er costs for stu­dents. Gen­er­al­ly, the com­pa­ny rents dig­i­tal text­books for 50% of the price that Ama­zon sells hard copies. That leaves stu­dents still pay­ing inflat­ed prices. And so the video above hard­ly con­sti­tutes an endorse­ment. It’s more to show you where the mar­ket is going.

See our young and grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free Text­books.

via Wired

Already, you can down­load a free app pro­duced by Cours­es­mart

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Philosophy on Late Night TV

in Philosophy, Television | April 5th, 2010

Last week, Craig Fer­gu­son prob­a­bly made a lit­tle tele­vi­sion his­to­ry when he invit­ed a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor to appear on The Late Late Show. The guest is Jonathan Dan­cy, a prof at UT-Austin, who also hap­pens to be the father of actor Hugh Dan­cy, and the father-in-law of actress Claire Danes. And the unlike­ly top­ic of dis­cus­sion? Moral par­tic­u­lar­ism, which argues that moral­i­ty is con­tex­tu­al, not objec­tive­ly defined. The con­ver­sa­tion runs 11 min­utes, and it’s intrigu­ing to see how Fer­gu­son and Dan­cy nav­i­gate the inter­view, try­ing to bring phi­los­o­phy and com­e­dy togeth­er. Mean­while, if you’re a reg­u­lar Open Cul­ture read­er, you’ll note that Dan­cy’s think­ing stands in sharp con­trast to the con­tro­ver­sial vision of moral phi­los­o­phy out­lined by Sam Har­ris at the recent TED Con­fer­ence. Part 2 con­tin­ues here.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.