Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It's not difficult at all to download it from archive.org. There are 33 volumes, and links to all of them on the page I listed. What did you find to be difficult about it?
BTW, you're very much exaggerating the difficulty of getting a printed copy, at least in the UK. I bought mine from eBay for about £30 ($50).
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I hadn't followed the link that you gave nor had I found the webpage on my own earlier, either. The webpage looks interesting, I'll really be looking it over.
Playing around with it for just the few minutes that I had, I did find it difficult to locate the volumes, though. For example, the first link for the "Read Online" format took me to volume
10; the first link for the "Full Text" format took me to volume
18. I feel pretty sure that the links following the first one would take me sequentially through the remaining volumes. But where are the links for the first 9 volumes and first 17 volumes, respectively? There aren't 33 (the number of volumes of the
EB) links for any of the formats, except for the "Pdf" one. All of the rest of the formats have less than 33 links--the "Kindle" format, for example, has just
22. To me it's more than a little bit confusing.
I had based my criticism of the Internet Archive, a few posts back, on my experiences in the past trying to locate on the Internet Archive the volumes needed to make complete sets of
other dictionaries and encyclopedias. I extrapolated that situation to finding the volumes of the 11th edition of the
EB. I shouldn't have done that. It may be that the volume numbers of all 33 volumes of the 11th edition of the
EB are stated in the descriptions of the individual volumes and it would be relatively easy, then, to compile a complete set. But I rather doubt it.
About what I implied about the difficulty in getting a physical copy of the set . . . . I was not as clear as I should have been. I took the course, whose professor made the comment that I referred to, in late 1984. I was thinking of the situation at that time then, and after that for a considerable period of time, before the use of personal computing devices was widespread and people had all kinds of search resources at their fingertips. Back then, if you had wanted a title like the 11th edition of the
EB, you basically had one reasonable option: get a used book dealer to do a search (I suppose that they used some early, rudimentary kind of computer network to do that). That involved some hassle, and then you had to wait for a while to see what, if anything, that the used book dealer came up with. Sure, if I decided right now to try to find a set of the 11th edition of the
EB, I feel fairly confident that I could find one within a few minutes using the computer that I'm using now.