Where To Buy The Prince

This review is of the (currently free) Kindle edition of The Prince.

As others have stated at much greater length and with far greater eloquence, this is one of the most important books of political thought and philosophy ever written, and a truly timeless classic. As such, the fact that it's available for free on Kindle makes this a terrific deal, worth every single penny and many more. All the usual conveniences of Kindle applies here: very fast to download via Whispernet, the handiness of being able to annotate and highlight important passages, bookmarking pages you want to reference again later, etc. The slickness of the Kindle format and capabilities plus the inherit worthiness of the book itself easily nets 4 stars.

It's been about forever since I last read The Prince, plus I don't really know anything about Italian, so I'm not really fit to talk about the quality of the translation. Suffice it to say that it's a fairly easy book to read and make sense of, but again I can't speak to how true this particular edition is to its source material.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this edition of The Prince that need to be mentioned, and which in the end detract a little from the overall score. The first and biggest is in the formatting of the book. In short, it looks like a plain-text notepad file converted into a Kindle book; there's no navigable Table of Contents or chapter breaks as with most commercial Kindle books, and the book itself flows from the title page almost directly into the background about Machiavelli and then from there straight into The Prince itself, with scarcely a break in the text to mark the transition. For someone well versed in The Prince this probably isn't much of an issue, but for the more casual reader it's a little distracting and may confuse some. The other problem is more one of personal preference, which is that there's no annotations alongside the text to put specific lines into context. Again, for someone well versed in Machiavelli's life and the real-world examples he uses throughout The Prince, this probably isn't a significant issue. For more casual readers, having a little context for the examples he uses would be helpful from time to time.

In the end, you get what you pay for, and as the above-reviewed version of The Prince was free, I can't complain too much. It's brilliant, it's relevant, and it's very convenient to have on my Kindle. What more do you want for the price?Get more detail about The Prince.