Comments on: Free online CliffsNotes

Free online CliffsNotes

bob sarabia — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 20:09:18 -0800

CliffsNotes is now offering 180 literature guides available for free online viewing.

By: bob sarabia

bob sarabia — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 20:10:44 -0800

downloading an entire guide cost $5.99, but you can still copy text and save individual pages.

By: drezdn

drezdn — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 20:14:19 -0800

Probably because Sparknotes has been doing the exact same thing for several years.

By: Hildago

Hildago — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 20:14:28 -0800

Meh, the book was better.

By: PrinceValium

PrinceValium — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 20:30:19 -0800

"The year is 1775, and life in England and France seems paradoxically the best and the worst that it can be."

By: Keyser Soze

Keyser Soze — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 20:35:29 -0800

Yes.

By: drezdn

drezdn — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 20:36:39 -0800

Why are the text ads for Bush?

By: islander

islander — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 21:04:28 -0800

I've resisted the obvious temptation to say something rude and nasty.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 21:07:05 -0800

Brings back memories... A few years ago, before the internet when multimedia CDs were huge, they put one out with all the Cliffs Notes. They were packed in for free with a lot of multimedia kits (CD drives+sound card+speaker), so you could get them at computer shows for $5 or so. All that content for so little money. On another note, wouldn't you think Cliffs Notes would be written at a lower reading level, given the traget audience? Their choice of words and their sentence structure are sometimes more complex than the original books.

By: drezdn

drezdn — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 21:15:23 -0800

In case you haven't been around the many times I've previously mentioned it, one of my jobs is at a bookstore. A customer called to see if we had cliffnotes for various books (20 in all), but the books were all young readers books (ie. stuff written for 5th graders), and the customer was in college. Why not just read the book, especially considering that the notes would probably take about the same amount of time.

By: rorycberger

rorycberger — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 21:53:24 -0800

On another note, wouldn't you think Cliffs Notes would be written at a lower reading level, given the traget audience? Their choice of words and their sentence structure are sometimes more complex than the original books. No, the target audience is college students who are too busy/lazy to read books, but smart enough to write intelligent papers based only on ~~reading~~ skimming the cliff's notes. It's not stupid people that read cliff's notes, just people that don't feel like spending the time to read the actual book.

By: Satapher

Satapher — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 23:27:36 -0800

Homer : 30 seconds?! But I want it now!

By: simcd

simcd — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:50:38 -0800

As a university student who sometimes managed to read the works of the author, and sometimes found something better to do with my week, I'd argue the ability to skim notes (York Notes was the UK equivalent I think) and produce a decent product at the end of it (i.e. an acceptable essay with some original thought in it) is a more useful life skill than spending hours on the original texts. I'm not saying it was right, just saying it's closer to what most of us do on a day to day basis.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 17:58:22 -0800

Education is wasted on youth.