Knowledge Problem: "Great Ideas" from Penguin Books
At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen points to a USA Today story about Penguin Books' new Great Ideas series. The books offer extracts, the USA Today story called them "samplings", from great non-fiction. The Penguin website invites visitors to vote on which of the first twenty books "you feel has had the most impact on the world." As of my visit, the voting was close between Darwin/On Natural Selectio and Marx and Engels/The Communist Manifest, each receiving around 20 percent of the vote with a slight edge to Marx and Engels. Of course, I have no idea which of the twenty books you feel has most affected the world, but on the narrower question of which book has most affected the world the nod would have to go to Darwin's On Natural Selection. Posted by Mike at October 7, 2005 09:43 AM

Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Penguin pack big ideas into tiny ...
Penguin hopes that the "Great Ideas" series, which is published this week, will tap into the sort of popular thirst for knowledge that the BBC campaign The ...