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.