Received the following email from Penguin. Unfortunately the email does not include a link.

E-BOOK EXPERIMENT CONTINUES WITH THE RELEASE OF THE PENGUIN ENRICHED E-BOOK CLASSIC EDITION OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S THE HEART OF DARKNESS ON OCTOBER 7, 2008

Penguin Enriched eBook Classics Features:

* Character Sketches
* Diagram of a typical Congo steamer, ca. 1890
* Images of the Congo
* Telling Africa’s Story Today: Recent Films About Africa
* Filmography of Heart of Darkness
* Contemporary Reviews of Heart of Darkness
* Further Reading
* Enriched eBook Notes

Before its 1902 publication HEART OF DARKNESS appeared as a three-part series in Blackwood’s Magazine. It tells the story of the seaman Marlow who journeys into the heart of Africa to discover how the enigmatic Kurtz has gained power over the local people. Widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon, it will be published for the first time as a Penguin Enriched eBook Classic on October 7, 2008 and priced at $8. Timothy S. Hayes is the Enriched eBook Features Editor.

Throughout the novel Conrad dramatizes Marlow’s internal struggle with the restraint of civilization and the savagery of barbarism. Replace the Congo with the moral degradation of the Iraq war, the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, or the present conflicts among feudal warlords in Africa and readers will see the relevance of this work today. Summed up in Kurtz’s last words, “The horror! The horror!” the theme of darkness within all mankind still rings true.

Penguin continues to take Penguin Classics into the new world of eBooks. The enriched format invites readers to go beyond the pages of these beloved works and gain more insight into the life and times of an author and the period in which the book was originally written—it’s a rich reading experience. The Penguin Enriched eBook Classics series continues Penguin’s mission to always connect the reader to the writer in whatever format the reader prefers.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Penguin mentions the inclusion of “Contemporary Reviews of Heart of Darkness”. This is a fine idea. I have always thought that supplementing Project Gutenberg texts with book reviews from the period of original publication would enrich the presentation and support informed selection. If a book is public domain then contemporaneous reviews should usually be in the public domain also.

    Do any blog readers know if there is a text scanning project that includes a corpus of book reviews? Does the “Distributed Proofreaders” volunteer organization, current supplier of most Project Gutenberg texts, scan many book reviews? The handsome Feedbooks website has appurtenances such as book cover scans and Amazon links on the individual web pages dedicated to texts. It would benefit I think from links to contemporaneous reviews if they were available.

    Of course all kinds of material falls into the maw of the Google scanning project. But they are not proofreading, and I do not think they have identified or linked book reviews to books – yet.

  2. @Charlie

    I agree: this is an exciting as well as an interesting development. Such enriched content would not be commercially possible with a p-book. It’s a bit like those movie DVDs where you get bonus material like commentaries from the director and producer, “the making of”, etc. And of course, there’s no reason not to include hyperlinks in an e-book: future displays are sure to be wirelessly connectable, and could allow links to be made invisible or not, as the user prefers.

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