Free online CliffsNotes
September 13, 2004 8:09 PM   Subscribe

CliffsNotes is now offering 180 literature guides available for free online viewing.
posted by bob sarabia (13 comments total)
 
downloading an entire guide cost $5.99, but you can still copy text and save individual pages.
posted by bob sarabia at 8:10 PM on September 13, 2004


Probably because Sparknotes has been doing the exact same thing for several years.
posted by drezdn at 8:14 PM on September 13, 2004


Meh, the book was better.
posted by Hildago at 8:14 PM on September 13, 2004




Yes.
posted by Keyser Soze at 8:35 PM on September 13, 2004


Why are the text ads for Bush?
posted by drezdn at 8:36 PM on September 13, 2004


I've resisted the obvious temptation to say something rude and nasty.
posted by islander at 9:04 PM on September 13, 2004


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.
posted by smackfu at 9:07 PM on September 13, 2004


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.
posted by drezdn at 9:15 PM on September 13, 2004


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.
posted by rorycberger at 9:53 PM on September 13, 2004


Homer : 30 seconds?! But I want it now!
posted by Satapher at 11:27 PM on September 13, 2004


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.
posted by simcd at 12:50 AM on September 14, 2004


Education is wasted on youth.
posted by stbalbach at 5:58 PM on September 14, 2004


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