100 titles easily accessible - try a new title! (100 Classic Book Collection (DS))

Member Name: julwhite

Product:	100 Classic Book Collection (DS)
Date:	29/04/09 (64 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Saves space, affordable and good introduction to new titles

Disadvantages: Still not as good as the real thing

The 100 Classic Book Collection is software for the Nintendo DS which contains the full text of one hundred different books, primarily books which come under the status of "books which everyone should read, but many of us haven't".

First of all, I am a book fan. If there was a choice of 100 new books being delivered, or just this one title, I'd always opt for the books option. There's something much better in my view in having a tangible item to pick up, read and even just look at on the shelf. And it also gives a certain look of respectability to have a wall full of book shelves and classic titles!

However, there are of course many advantages of having these titles in this format. It takes up less space, is more portable and is of course cheaper. Using this product is easy, easier than I expected just using the normal Nintendo DS controllers. If you don't like the configuration which is offered by default, you are able to change it.

There are some titles on this cartridge which I would likely never have even started to read if they hadn't been included, so for ease of accessibility this is a great piece of software. There is something exciting about reading books in this format, especially given that the pages do feel very easy to read on the screen. So in terms of enhancing the mind, this is a product that works and could well be a very good introduction to books for children.

There is a facility to download more titles, although I didn't try this. It does however seem a sensible thing to do, to easily increase the number of titles available. Given the number of books available for free on sites such as Project Gutenberg on-line, it would seem very positive if there could be some sort of link-up to increase the number of titles available.

I won't give a complete list of titles on this cartridge to save pointlessly copying text, but I enjoyed reading the Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain titles. I'm not much of a Shakespeare fan, but there are 22 of these. This is very useful for those users who want access to Shakespeare, but for it to take up nearly a quarter of all of the titles is quite a high proportion.

Price-wise, this product is available for 15 pounds from Amazon, although can be found slightly cheaper if you hunt around some other web-sites. Compared to the cost of 100 books however, this is of course a much cheaper option.

Overall, I would say that this format of reading books doesn't replace my love of the actual physical book, and ideally I'd always rather read a book. However, this product in my view does increase the chances of many people (including myself) reading a title that they might not have otherwise have done so, so that's definitely a positive!

Summary: Good value, very useful introduction into different books and authors