And can we make a decent open access reading list ?

I recently suggested that it might be able to put together an open access reading list for the classics.

So I did, purely as an experiment. I picked a very random (and very short) list of university classics departments and downloaded their introductory reading lists. Some were fairly short some were more oriented to summer reading (and the suspicion that most students would do little if any). I collated the Exeter, Tufts, Warwick and KCL lists and came up with the following:

Author	Book	Source	Online
Homer	Iliad	KCL, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Homer	Odyssey	Exeter, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Sophocles	Oedipus	KCL, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Sophocles	Antigone	Tufts	Gutenberg
Virgil	Aeneid	KCL, Exeter, Warwick	Adelaide e-books
Tacitus	Annals	KCL, Exeter	Adelaide e-books
Juvenal	Satires	KCL, Warwick	Internet Archive
Plato	Symposium	Exeter, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Plato	Republic	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Herodotus	Histories	Exeter, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Suetonius	Lives of the Caesars	Exeter	Gutenberg
Seneca	Letters from a Stoic	Exeter	Internet archive
Ovid	Metamorphoses	Exeter	Adelaide e-books
Lucian	True History	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Theocritus	Idylls	Tufts	Gutenberg
Aristotle	Poetics	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Aristotle	Nichormachean Ethics	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Longus	Daphne and Chloe	Tufts	Internet Archive
Thucydides	Histories	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Xenophon	Anabasis	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Horace	Satires	Warwick	Adelaide e-books
Aristophanes	Clouds	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Aeschylus	Oresteia	Tufts	Adelaide e-books

In the main I found the texts on the University of Adelaide's ebook sitse. Adelaide E-books (ebooks.adelaide.edu.au) is a paricularly good source of texts and in some cases has alternative translations, as well as links to wikipedia etc. It's not just classical texts, there's a good range of English literature texts as well.

All sites allow downloads in both epub and mobi format meaning that the books can be read on a kindle or on a tablet, including one of the cheap no-name Android tablets that can be picked up for less than a $100, in some cases considerably less.

I've made no attempt to assess the text for accuracy, but what this little paper exercise shows is that it is perfectly possible to create an open access reading list.

While you may argue that having to own a tablet is a barrier to access, most (potential) students already have a suitable device, and with a decent second hand paperback copy of Suetonius's Twelve Caesars costing around $10 with shipping we can argue that even if you have to buy a tablet the exercise is better than cost neutral ...