I made another great discovery a few days ago. My translation of Kierkegaard’s Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford, 2009) is now on Google books. Yes, that’s right. It’s not the whole version, but only a portion of it. Still, what’s there is searchable. This is very good news because the print version has no index. Oxford decided against the inclusion of an index, I presume, because including one would have increased production costs and delayed publication (see below). Of course this wouldn’t have been a problem if Oxford had produced an ebook version along with the paperback. Unfortunately, Oxford does not appear to be so forward looking as Cambridge, which produced a Kindle edition of Alastair Hannay’s new translation of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (which is not only searchable but is only $17.60 as opposed to $33.81 for the paperback).

I’d like to put in a plug here for ebooks, and, in particular, for the Kindle ebook reader. I won my Kindle in a contest sponsored by the German publisher Springer just over a year ago and fell completely in love with it. I can get books instantly on my Kindle from wherever I am, I can highlight and cut and paste text and make notes and then upload all this material to my computer. Kindle also allows me to move easily back and forth between text and notes. It’s a scholar’s dream. Yes, it is a way for Amazon to sell books, but what’s wrong with that. I was buying tons of books from Amazon already anyway. Now I am paying less for them. What people don’t know, however, is that many of the books in the “Kindle store” are actually free because they are in the public domain. When you search for a book, if it’s what you could call a classic, then you’ll normally get several pages of hits. If you don’t have to have a particular edition and you don’t want to pay for the book, you just have to look through the various editions until you find the free ones (there are often several free editions). You can also put ebooks that you already have as Word or pdf files on your Kindle.

Ebooks are both the future of reading and the future of scholarship.

I’m sure there’s more great stuff out there on Google books. If my new translations are up there, then there are going to be lots of other books you’ve been wanting but have put off buying because of the expense. Try a little web surfing yourself and if you find anything good, let me know!

(See blog entry from 1/16/11 for info about a free index to Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs.)

Happy New Year!