Coming to a library near you:

Beginning in January of next year, Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World will be available electronically, in its entirety, at libraries and institutions. Through an agreement between Britannica and Ingram Digital, the Great Books will be accessible through Ingram’s industry-leading MyiLibrary e-book platform.

The electronic Great Books will contain precisely the same contents as the printed version, with hypertext links from entries in the Syntopicon—the idea index—and the places in the text those entries refer to. The digital corpus will be fully searchable.

If your library doesn’t subscribe, you will have the option of purchasing the electronic version of the Great Books yourself. We’ll have more details when the product becomes available next month.

The Art of Reading
Another new Great Books product we’re delighted to announce is a series of long-lost videos on the art of reading with Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, which will be distributed by the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas.

Adler’s How to Read a Book was an off-the-charts bestseller when first published in 1940. In 1972 he and Van Doren collaborated on the book’s third edition, and a few years later they sat down for several conversations on the book’s main themes. The result was a series of thirteen videos that Britannica issued in the late 1970s.

Somehow, those videos got lost in the sturm and drang of the past three decades, and they would have remained forever so had it not been for the intrepid sleuthing of the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, which tracked down what may have been the only extant set and made it possible for them to be reissued today on a single DVD.

We’re happy now to work in partnership with the Center to make these intriguing conversations available again. To get more information about the DVD, watch a sample, and place an order, go to:

www.thegreatideas.org/HowToReadABook.htm.

Reposted from the Britannica Blog