DS Novel coming to UK as 100 Classic Book Collection

It includes only books that are at least 75 years old and therefore don't require paying for licence.

All of those books are available for 2$ at any used book shop. Or free at a library. No need to buy a 30$ game.....or whatever the base price is in Europe.

It occurs to me that I don't know what used book shops charge in Europe. It also occurs to me that people actually read books in Europe, and "classics" might not be so easy to get as they are in North America, where you can buy brand new copies of anything older than 50 years old used with ease thanks to students never, ever reading.

What a magical world Europe must be.

It's not illiteracy as much as it is, in fact, the enduring popularity of the "classics" that cause them to be so easily available in book stores decades and centuries after their creation. Being common fare for both high school students as well as adults who may have matured enough to seek knowledge (if extremely basic) of culture and the arts, publishers find it profitable to continually reprint certain texts year in and year out. I just can't see their availability as a result of mass stupidity.

To be fair, I'm cynical because I went through public school and university in the American south. People are dumber in the south. And damn it, it makes me weep for the future of the human race in general. I know that elsewhere people don't say things like "you ain't from 'round here, are you boy?" to anyone who speaks coherent English.

However, I still argue that very few high school kids are reading what they are told to read. And all those classic books in used book shops in pristine condition haven't been read at all....just bought because they were required reading for some university course, never read, and sold ultimately. And the fact that the classics keep getting printed is probably due to (a) the fact that high schools buy them in bulk, (b) the fact that uni students HAVE to buy them at marked up prices, (c) the fact that public domain books don't have the problem of contracts and fees to pay, and (d) douchebag psuedointellectuals like to keep them on their shelves to look smart to their equally shallow friends.

This is not to say people don't read old books. But I doubt that as many people as you think do.

I didn’t say that I thought book-reading was a common pastime in America. I have every right to be as cynical as you, as I spent twelve years at an impoverished rural high school, am mostly self-educated, and was just as derided for refusing to speak with the disgusting, unintelligible twang that everyone around me used, but I can’t be cynical because I don’t see it as something endemic to American culture, or, to state it in a different way, the Europe you seem to look to for hope as an enlightened anti-America where the commoner and the intelligentsia are one and the same and everyone is a wellspring of insight on deep and esoteric philosophy and literature is highly idealized. Wherever one goes, they’re going to find that there is both interest and disinterest in learning, and, whatever the case, I doubt that the fact that Europe is leading the world in mathematics, sciences, and overall education is due to the fact that their teenagers can quote more lines from 1984 or War and Peace than American teenagers can. Literacy and the ability to recognize meaningful literature are but parts of a quality education.

I still can’t help but think you’re jumping to conclusions about an entire nation’s reading habits from what you’ve observed in a used book store. You can’t tell whether or not a book has been read just from the fact that it’s been pawned off or the fact that it was kept in good condition, so any arguments stemming from this about larger quantities of a book in a used book store implying that fewer people have read that book are invalid. I can’t divine one thing about the relationship between my used college textbooks and their former owners (except that, by the smell, the former owner of my criminology textbook commonly smoked pot while reading it.) People sell books for quick money whether or not they’ve read them—especially if it was for an assignment and a student had to wolf down huge chunks of a novel in a hurry, they’re not going to want to read it again for a long time, so they had might as well recoup a little money. It’s not a strange, passive-aggressive way of telling one’s teacher, professor, or the book itself “tl;dr”. None of this is evidence of mass student illiteracy, but, rather, inference made based upon a negative preconceived notion. I’m in no way defending the people who skip out on assigned readings. They’re lazy and they deserve to fail. But sales are still a better determinant of how widely a book is read than the number of copies sold back to stores—even if they’re bought in bulk for classes, in reality a minority of any class is going to intentionally fail by not reading it, and an even smaller number can BS their way through with internet summaries and the like.

You'll be able to download new books on the regular DS too - the cartridge comes with 1MB savefile.

If they put current books on the cart, the game would cost 900$ and probably mostly have "chick lit" and John Grisham novels.