From: "Charles E. Jones" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 01:39:09 +0000

Needless to say (so I'll say it) you can arrange a 60 day free trial
and encourage your local community to react to it. If you have
responsibility for, or interest in, Classics or Antiquity more
generally I invite you to join the Forum for Classics, Libraries, and
Scholarly Communication (https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/info/fclsc)
and pass along your community's reactions to this collection. FCLSC
will be listening carefully and I believe Harvard and Loeb will be
too.

-Chuck Jones-
Penn State U.

[MOD NOTE: These sound like polite ways of saying "very expensive
for academic libraries!"]

________________________________________

From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 20:49:21 -0400

The Loeb Classical Library, with its serried ranks of red and green
small format hardcover volumes comprising texts and translations of
the Greek and Latin classics, is familiar to many.  A substantial rack
of them was an early sign in the first Borders bookstore you ever
entered that this place was taking the serious reader to the next
level.  It has now been released (all 500-odd current volumes) in
digital form:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/loeb/digital.html

There is no public release of information about institutional pricing,
but "the street" suggests librarians will not be surprised by an
opportunity to buy the collection for a number rather more than it
would cost to buy a complete set of the bound volumes; discounts are
promised for secondary schools in particular.  Remarkably, individual
subscriptions are offered at a first-year price of $195, subsequent
*consecutive* years for $65.

The series has flourished greatly in recent years under stellar
leadership, refreshing musty old translations with sharp new ones by
the best scholars and selling well besides.  It comes into the digital
marketplace at a time when libraries have many other opportunities to
flesh out their digital collections, of course, but it also faces one
interesting competitor:  the Loeb Classical Library.  Volumes from the
productive early years over a century ago are widely and freely
available on the net courtesy of Google Books and other providers,
marked (with what accuracy, I cannot judge) as 'public domain' and
conveniently aggregated on a site offering DownLOEBables:

http://www.edonnelly.com/loebs.html -- translations indeed perhaps
musty and bowdlerized, but at a compelling price point.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U.